On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Ben Harris wrote:

> 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.

Testing is the main reason I decided to upgrade at least one of them to 8
MB, and with the clearance prices that Simtec had, I just took both of
them in the same go. I also ordered a new ARM3 for my R140 that can take
an FPA10, and an FPA10. So both of my boxes should be equipped with FPA10
in the near future.

> > 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.

Is there anything I can do to help you out here?

> > 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.

Well, slow is ok. I just leave one of them running the build, and when it
is finished, it's finished. :-)

> > 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.

What would you say is the practical limit on an i386? How much should I
have in order to cross-compile arm26. I've got a 486DX/33 lying around
that I could probably get at least 16 MB into. Will that be enough?

Also, will the following description suffice for a cross-build on a
NetBSD/sparc 1.5 system:
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/cross/

What about config, that normally changes from time to time and needs to be
recompiled? So, do I really need to have a Self build compiler for the
host system?

Will the latest snapshot (5 Oct 2000) be sufficiently new as a basis for
cross-compiling?

TIA!

Kjetil B.
mailto:kjetil@thomassen.priv.no
http://www.thomassen.priv.no/