Hi,

I finally found some time to work on a NetBSD port to Siemens/Nixdorf
RM-Series
machines (I have worked on porting Linux - more or less successfully -
several
years ago). These machines are R4k-based (R5k/R10k based machines also exist,
but I only have some older machines available) and can run in either big
endian
(Sinix firmware) or little endian (ARC firmware) mode.

I'm targeting the big endian systems (which is IMHO more common and I
generally
like big endian machines more ;-)) and got a big endian MIPS kernel to
load and
start via tftp (cross compiled on OS X using a sgimips cross toolchain,
which seems
to work fine). Now the real work begins which probably involves a lot of
reverse
engineering due to lack of documentation...

Taking a look at the Sinix header files and an objdump of a Sinix kernel, the
firmware seems to be an extended version of the old mipsco firmware
(pre-ARCS),
but probably with some extensions. Does anyone have documentation on the old
MIPS firmware - especially on calls that return information on hardware
configuration
(prom_get_mem_conf, prom_get_hwconfig) - if these are available on mipsco
systems?

Siemens seems to have added some calls to obtain PCI information
(prom_pci_get_dev_info, prom_pci_get_class_info, prom_pci_get_dev_pathname,
prom_pci_get_index_max, prom_pci_get_conf_info) which probably are not
available
on mipsco machines, but I'm probably out of luck finding information on
these.

So, I'm trying to get these machines running with NetBSD but can't promise
a fixed
schedule (unfortunately ;-), I have to work on my Ph.D. thesis and do some
teaching
next semester...). Any support is, of course, welcome - I'll try to
summarize all
information I manage to find out on these machines.

regards,
     Michael Engel