>> I agree.  Since the normal mode of operation for the rocket was to coexist
>> with the main processor, rather than to take over, Rocket support would
>> require a lot of knowlege about the rocket that may or not be available.
>
>It would be do-able but a better option might be this:
>
>NuBus cards that had on-board CPU's were supposed to run A/ROSE which was
>a mini-OS. I assume you had to run A/ROSE for the Rocket to run, right?
>
>In that case, what you do to get the card to work is treat it like a
>separate computer "networked" to the machine. A good place to start would
>be to take the m68k/VME kernel and adapt it to the Rocket. Then what you
>do is make the card's NuBus slot a ifconfigable network. Then you add
>a similar ifconfigable network driver to NetBSD/mac68k.
>
>So the machine boots twice in a sense. First the motherboard CPU boots
>NetBSD/mac68k and then a special bootstrap lkm or something would boot
>NetBSD/rocket68k (sounds like a nice name) on the card. The card then
>acts like a diskless server and connects to the motherboard over the
>"network". So things might look like this:
>
>So a boot might look like:
>
>...
>nubus0 slot C: Radius Rocket detected.
>...
>Starting daemons: inetd, lpd, pppd.
>Loading Rocket Boot LKM
>Loading netbsd.rocket...
>rocket0: Preserving 4585747 bytes of symbol table
>rocket0: NetBSD/Rocket68k
>rocket0: Copyright Regents of California (c)1997
>rocket0: --
>rocket0: nunet0 at nubus0: Host connected.
>rocket0: Booting NFS from nunet0, addr:192.168.1.2 NFS host at 192.168.1.1
>rocket0: Starting daemons: inetd.
>rocket0:
>rocket0: NetBSD/Rocket68k
>rocket0: login:
>
>NetBSD/Mac68k
>login:
>
>So essentially the Rocket runs as a headless, diskless, machine with an
>ultra-high speed bus network to the motherboard machine. So you do things
>like start your X server on the Motherboard processor, telnet into the
>Rocket, and run your clients and anything else off the Rocket. You
>could even setup the motherboard as a gateway for the rocket or use IP NAT
>and have it do things like serve printers or have other access to the network.
>
>Some other nice things might be to let the rocket grab other NuBus slots so
>it can do things like grab a secondary ethernet card or even better, a video
>card.
>
>All of this requires minimal changes to NetBSD/Mac68k and only requires
>investigating the Rocket's hardware and porting the NetBSD/vme68k code.
>
>Cool idea. I'd love to implement it but I'm still trying to get that pesky
>intvid code out. If only I had more time!!!!

I agree, that would be _very_ cool. it could also be very handy for folks
who wanted to have both netbsd and the mac available, but who didn't have
two machines. I don't know how many rockets there are out there, but they
are quite cheap. Do you know if radius is open with information about them?
They might not care too much since it is an orphaned product.

You sure you don't want the Rocket to play with. If you worked on that and
the color lkm, you might never graduate ;)

Brad


Stephen B. Salai                            Phone (716) 325-5553
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