Hey everyone,

The college I'm attending was given ~90 MBX860/821 systems by Motorola a
few years ago, and they have been sitting in a store-room since then.
They've given me a workstation, "office space" (in the back of a chemical
storage room ;-) and a special projects class to "do something useful
with the darn things." I figure I'll port NetBSD to this machine.

As of right now, this is what I have going:

* I have all the manuals and documentation associated with the product,
  and the manuals for the PowerPPC processor used in the machine. I
  also have 4.4BSD Design and Implementation, and a few other useful
  reference books.

* Real Time Systems, Inc., started a port, and have the kernel doing
  some basic init work, and printing hello on the serial console. I
  have emailed one of the engineers at RTS, and he passed on some
  other useful tips. I intend to use their code as a base to start mine
  from.

* The MBX system is excellently documented, and the firmware is very
  nice - it can load ELF objects, set breakpoints, and do TFTP.

* Red Hat's eCos works on this machine, although it is a much more
  limited OS. It may prove a good place for ideas.

* The hardware is pretty standard: SuperIO serial/parallel ports, PCI
  bus, SVGA graphics card, etc.

Things going against:

* The MMU is different than that used in other PPC machines.

* There is no FPU on board, so I'll have to port some FPU emulation code
  from another arch. 

I figure that about 40% of the job will be to write pmap.c, and 35% will 
be to make npx work.

Anyway, I'm posting just to check whether someone would like to come out
of the closet and confess that they've secretly been working on an MBX
port and they're almost done. Although I'm eager to do this port, I have
no intention of duplication someone else's work.

I figure this is rather esoteric hardware, so I won't be bombarded with
"me too" requests. Unfortunately, I can't ship one of these things to
anyone - the college won't even let me take them home.

Any other advice on what I'm about to undertake would be appreciated.

Thanks!
-- 
Bruce J.A. Nourish <bjan+JUNK@bjan.net>
+JUNK is bit-bucket; remove it to email me.