I have recently bought a Kinetic Card for my RiscPC and am happy
to report that NetBSD/arm32 works fine on it. However you will
need the 'memfix11' update from the Castle web site otherwise the
bootloader does not work. (This is really to fix a problem with
memory allocation for the PC Card but the bootloader needs it
too.) To be honest I cannot say if it has had any great impact on
the speed of NetBSD. It is hard to tell if NetBSD is using the
faster memory or not.
Question: does NetBSD allocate the *physical* memory from the highest
addresses downwards or from the lowest addresses upwards? The faster
memory is at a higher address. My RiscPC has physical memory blocks
as follows:
    0x10000000  4096 pages
    0x18000000  4096 pages
    0x20400000  7168 pages
    0x30000000  8192 pages
The first two are the old, 'slow' memory and the other two blocks
are the new, faster memory on the Kinetic Card. Obviously if the
kernel allocates memory from the low addresses then you will not
see any improvement but if it allocates it from the high addresses
first then things should be different. I could look though the
source and try to figure it out for myself, but if anyone could
provide a quick answer, I would be grateful.
Dave Daniels
 
 
 
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