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On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 08:10:09PM -0500, David Deckert wrote:
> Although most places (yours included) state that PowerMacs without Open
> Firmware won't run any *nix-type OS besides MkLinux I have Yellow Dog
> 2.3 running on a 6100.

Where do you suppose Yellow Dog got the code that initializes the
devices on that system? :^>

> The other distro I believe to be available is Debian, although you won't
> find it mentioned on their site either.

Again, this would work by using the device probing from MkLinux.
Which means you're running on top of Mach. Which is not something
we'd particularly like to be doing.

> Perhaps someone with the knowledge and interest could at least
> modify the YDL or Debian kernels for other OSes.

I think you're a bit confused as to just what precisely is a kernel
and what the (political) differences between Linux and BSD are.
Suffice to say that Linux's license (the GPL) *prevents* us from
directly using any code without also licensing the resultant code
under the GPL, a step most folks 'round here aren't willing to make.

The fact that MkLinux (and anything that works on NuBus PPCs by way
of its code) runs on top of Mach, which is a micro-kernel architecture,
and NetBSD *is* a monolithic kernel architecture, which we happen to
prefer for a variety of OS design, reasons makes a NetBSD port to
work on NuBus macs by way of Mach less than attractive.

Oh, and then there's the detail that we don't work on a PowerPC 601.
That's a problem it's fairly feasible to fix, though. The chink in
the armor there is that there exist a few Apple models with 601s and
OpenFirmware. (The 7200 is the canonical example, but 7500s shipped
with 601s too, and there are some Europe-only systems like this as
well.)

The more attractive way in for NuBus PowerMacs is to boot them in
the same way we do on the mac68k port; boot a minimal MacOS install
to initialize the devices, then boot NetBSD from that. It's clunky
looking, but it's actually less clunky internally than running atop
Mach, and definitely faster.

> Just wondering if interest in the NuBus Macs come up much, given that
> they should be a little more desireable than the 68k models, and
> probably more available.

Interest has definitely come up, and they are slightly more
attractive than m68ks, but they're certainly far less available.
Only three US models with NuBus and PowerPCs were ever made. Before
that we had years and years of m68k-based Macs, and since than we've
had a few years of OpenFirmware-based PowerMacs. The NuBus PowerMacs
are really a brief changeover between the two, which is why they've
been left out in the cold so much (and not just by NetBSD; you'll
find it very difficult to make various vendors' hardware and
software behave on them, even under MacOS).

--=20
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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