On Nov 18, 2004, at 9:30 AM, Tim Kelly wrote:

>> 0) the world is biased towards linux and x86
>> solution: I don't know one
>
> It's not truly a competition. One of the core strengths of NetBSD is 
> its
> ability to teach. Just look how often OpenBSD bases their code on
> NetBSD.

An even better example would be Debian NetBSD which runs either the 
Debian userland on a NetBSD kernel or a NetBSD userland on a Debian 
kernel. Why? Because they can.

>> 1) hardware support is limited. My 8200 mac is not supported, my
>> pb1400 either. The only viable box I found is my 9500.
>> workaround: get another box...
>> solution: as far as the ppc601 concerns, someone had success on rs6k
>> machines. since the a PCI/601 combination is possible (on x200
>> machines and as cpu doughterboard) someone with experience could try
>> to see if we as macppc could benefit too
>
> I've got a 7200 here, which is a ppc601. I could probably convince my
> wife to let me...borrow... it for a bit, but we also have to ask
> ourselves how far back in hardware do we want to support?

I've seen posts that 601 support was integrated and working, hopefully 
its just a matter of someone stealing a 7200, 8200 or 7300 to test it. 
If it works then tell the mac68k people so they can get those PPC 
accelerator cards to do something useful :) I don't know if it's 
complete, only in current or what. I long since got rid of my x200's 
since they couldn't even run MacOS without crashing.

>> 2. installation troubles. It was really hard to boot that thing! I
>> admit that the fact that old 1.0 OF defaults to serial console is a
>> drawback...

There's only so much that can be done on that front. I think the best 
situation would be to boot a microkernel from floppy that scours the 
device tree and looks for input and output devices and sets up 
everything for you and reboots back to openfirmware. This could be done 
with MacOS 7.5 disk utility floppies for instance.

> Right now I'd like to see additional resolutions, so at least
> we can have more than 640x480 (someone correct me if I'm wrong and this
> is already present). There are OF routines to allow this(fb8 calls), 
> but
> I haven't had time to explore them.

I think there's a document on playground.sun.com/1275 about both VGA 
bindings to OpenFirmware and Linear FB bindings to OpenFirmware. 
They're both drafts though and who knows how closely Apple has followed 
them. I've only started reading some of that.