On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Henry B. Hotz wrote:

> At 1:59 PM -0800 3/8/00, Charles Fultz wrote:
> >I'm interested in a port of the NuBus PowerMac machines.  I have a PM
> >8100/80AV.  I'd like to know if you have any suggestions on where I
> >should start with porting NetBSD for my PM 8100, and any other NuBus
> >machine.
> 
> Well, the simple answer (which may not be the simple or right solution) is
> to create a new port which uses the port-mac68k device drivers, boot code,
> and utilities and uses the port-macppc stuff for everything else.

Ack! No! :-) sune/sun3x did that, and then re-merged a short while later.
:-)

You don't need a different port! There are however two main parts of a
port to NuBus machines: 601 support and support for that hardware.

601 support is (mostly) going into the arch/powerpc area and adding 601
support. For userland, I don't think there are many changes - they were
mostly system (but that means you have to deal with them ;-)

Actually the recent changes to support the uni-north chip set should make
hardware support easier. 

Now in a config we have:

bandit* at mainbus?
grackle* at mainbus?
uninorth* at mainbus?

pci*	at bandit? bus ?
pci*	at grackle? bus ?
pci*	at uninorth? bus ?
pci*	at ppb? bus ?

All you'd need to do is add something like:

bart* at mainbus?

and

nubus*	at bart? bus ?

(AMIC or HMC would be other possible names). Then just have the bart bus
code not use OF, and have the OF routines do something sane if they get
called (with bootX I think we get passed in a hardware device tree we can
traverse ourselves).

> Since Linuxppc works on that machine (I think) there is obviously lots of
> material to be had over in that camp which might be of interest.  They have
> a booter utility BootX (I think) which works across all PPC architectures,
> and there has been some discussio of adapting it or something like it to
> work with port-macppc.

mkLinux, but yeah. :-)

Take care,

Bill