On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 06:43:14AM -0500, Benjamin T. Schucker wrote:
> I saw on the NetBSD site that you were trying to find someone to help 
> port NetBSD to the older Powermacs.  I'm will to help with the port. 
> I do not have any experience with this sort of programming but I 
> believe that with a little guidance I could do the work.  I'm a 
> Computer Engineering major at Penn State and would find the challenge 
> interesting.

Not that I'm by any means in charge of anything, but I've seen a few
of these "willing to help support for {601s|nubus powermacs}" go by
with little response, largely because those of us who are regulars
are tired of thinking about it.

If you're serious (see if you can get course credit, btw, really
helps the motivation), a good place to start would be reading
through the mail archive (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-macppc/)
for the previous discussions of this.

The short story is that two things need to happen: macppc needs
nubus support and it needs 601 support.

The first we can *maybe* steal from mac68k, though it means booting
in the same way that does (through MacOS) since nubus macs have no
convenient way of getting hardware handles (OpenFirmware does this
on PCI macs), which the mac68k port solves by having MacOS hand
the kernel the device handles. That is, needless to say, suboptimal,
but changing it means figuring out all the proper ways to speak to
every single piece of hardware in any nubus mac, and considering
how often Apple's jumbled stuff around and how poorly documented
it is exactly what's in which machine, this becomes a coding
nightmare (not to mention how hard it would be just to get one's
hands on a sample of each nubus mac out there).

The second needs some pretty low-level work, as later PPCs differ
in rather important ways from the 601. The bright side is that if
you choose to write 601 support, you'll still make a lot of people
(anyone with an x200 PowerMac) happy, and you'll already be bootable
because of the OF stuff.

If I were going to do this (and I don't really have time), I would
start with the 601.

Oh, and you'll want to do a lot of reading of the NetBSD kernel
source before you get started.

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net