At 10:14 PM -0700 7/9/02, Matt Thomas wrote:
>Well, I got the Xserve to boot NetBSD/macppc -current today.

Sweet!

>I had to tweak a few things (to match a GMAC id, make brgphy.c
>match the BCM5421 phy id), and new PCI device names, etc.
>
>But it wasn't that difficult.  The system is now booting off the
>local disk straight into NetBSD.  I still have no idea what the
>unconfigured Ethernet is but it's not in OFW.

Unless you BTO'd it to exclude it, the Xserve ships with a PCI 
Ethernet card in the PCI/AGP4x slot.

>One issue is that even pciide is report the drive is using DMA, 
>doing a dd only gets a little of 6MB/s and spends all of its time in 
>system during the dd.

Just out of curiousity...what's dd's perf under OSXS on it?

>One last note about the Xserve.  Don't even think about getting for home.
>It is the loudest 1U box I've ever heard.  I had to use my noise
>cancelling headphones just to make it tolerable.

hehe, yeah, I'd heard that from a few people (not that I'll have one 
in the near future). A guy at http://homepage.mac.com/xibalba/xserve/ 
made an MP3 of it shutting down using his TiBook's mic to show just 
how loud it is.

Mike
-- 
Bikers don't *DO* taglines.