Subject: Re: i960 port?
To: None <netbsd-ports@netbsd.org>
From: Toru Nishimura <locore32@gaea.ocn.ne.jp>
List: netbsd-ports
Date: 07/27/2001 22:06:19
From: Greg Madden <Greg@gmadden.com>

> Is there anything on a NetBSD port for the i960?
>
> Regards,
>
> - Greg

There is no i960 porting effort and its quite unlikely to happen because the
majority of i960 processor variants have no MMU hardware inside.  I suspect
of MMU capable i960 once announced was ever used by any products on
market.  According to terse documents found at Intel.com, the MMU design
looks pretty weird and far from "RISC approach."  i960 was well accepted by
embedded market, say X-terminal or dedicated I/O processor of RAID
controller.  If I was an engineer to think about i960 for such products, I
would
never be attracted by the odd MMU architecture.  I even dream of 80386
MMU for i960 just like as Intel once did for i860 processor.

Tohru Nishimura