On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Martijn van Buul wrote:

> Alohas!
> 
> No, I won't ask why my Performa 5200 won't boot NetBSD. I allready know
> why. However, if there's anything I could do, I'd be glad to be of
> any help (Provided that it's possible to cross-compile kernels neatly on a
> Wintel-box - Sorry. Don't have another Mac at hand..) (Said box currently
> runs FreeBSD, but installing NetBSD 1.4/i386 isn't a very big problem)
> 
	We have a cross/powerpc-netbsd package in pkgsrc - there are notes
	on using this to compile a bebox kernel (which is pretty much the
	same) at:
	http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/bebox/cross.html

	It would probably be a little more effort to do it on FreeBSD,
	YMMV.  I've always been a big fan of being able to have the same
	OS across different hardware :)

> Yes, I do have programming skills :)
> 
> I do have one question though:
> 
> >From a hardware-point of view, these machines much more resemble a M68K
> Mac than a "decent" PowerPC mac. Wouldn't it be a better idea to hack
> m68kBSD into working, instead of adding NuBUS and non-OF support to
> the PowerPC port? I assume that this has been asked before, but I couldn't
> really find it on the archives of this mailinglist on www.netbsd.org.

	The best approach would be to take the nubus and similar code from
	the mac68k port, make it Machine Independent, and conditionally
	include it on the macppc port. There are MI drivers for virtually
	all the other busses used in the various NetBSD ports in /sys/dev
	(PCI, ISA, SCSI, USB, EISA, VME, PCMCIA, QBUS etc)
	and many MI chipset drivers in /sys/dev/ic.

	I'm sure some mac68k people may have helpful suggestions to make
	on this :)

		David/absolute