Re: Looking for suggestions for small, low power machine

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 12:20:49PM +0100, bifferos ' wrote:
> Andy,
> 
> The Bifferboard (www.bifferos.com) is well suited to what you are
> doing, however NetBSD won't run on it.  I'm prepared to help anyone
> who wants to port it, however it needs NetBSD to support a 386 cpu.
> It also needs an R6040 ethernet driver to be written, but that's a
> fairly easy exercise as I already have example code (my own work, not
> copied from Linux).

We have one in -current now.

> 
> The Bifferboard BIOS is able to boot Multiboot binaries from flash, so
> the later versions of NetBSD should sort-of work, however at the same
> time you need to go back to earlier versions of NetBSD to allow a boot
> on such 'old' hardware (no APIC, no cpuid etc...).  I was trying to
> unravel this last year, but eventually gave up.  I presume this would
> be a lot easier for someone who's worked on the x86 port, perhaps
> whoever took out the 386 support in the first place (I've no idea if
> that decision was made explicitly, and can be reversed).
> 
> I can provide discounted hardware to anyone wanting to work on this.

i'm not sure it's worth it. there are now vortex86 chips much faster
than this one, with the same power requirements.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--