On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Kjetil B. Thomassen wrote:

> In my R140, I have an Ether3, an HCCS IDE podule with an onboard 200 MB
> harddrive and an AKA-30 SCSI card. This card, unfortunately, does not have
> an Acorn ROM, as that disappeared when I lent it to someone. It does have
> a PowerROM, so maybe something can be work out there.
>
> Is there any way I can force the arm26 kernel into identifying the Acorn
> SCSI card as such and not probe it like I can on arm32?

At the moment, no.  I'd like to add proper support for the PowerROM, which
shouldn't be hard, since we've already got support for podule loaders in
general (I needed this to get the Ethernet address out of my EtherLan
cards).  If you don't mind testing things, I'll try to do some work on
this soon.

> Also, when I get this thing up and running with 8 MB, it will be usable,
> so it would be nice if someone could upload a new snapshot with a current
> kernel.

Yeah, I really should do that.  Soon.

> Then we have the subject of trying to build stuff on arm26. Is it feasible
> to build anything on an R140 with 8 MB RAM, 200 MB IDE drive and ARM3 @33
> MHz using an Ether3 card to mount source and object directories over NFS?

I've never tried, but I know that compiling kernels on my 8 MB 386 was
painful.  The problem is that some files (nfs_vnops.c, for instance) push
GCC's working set above the amount of user RAM, and everything goes very,
very slow.

> Or, should I rather use my SPARCstation 2 with 64 MB RAM for
> crosscompiling?

That would certainly be better.  CPU speed is much less important than RAM
here.

-- 
Ben Harris                                                   <bjh21@netbsd.org>
Portmaster, NetBSD/arm26               <URL:http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/arm26/>