Re: Kernel progress

[Jean-Baptiste Boric <jblbeurope%gmail.com@localhost>]

> If the original gxemul author is non responsive after sending patches
> back you could always provide a patchset which could be used by the
> emulators/gxemul pkgsrc package, so the out of the box gxemul on
> NetBSD and related systems is ps2 serial capable :)

I haven't tried to send my patch upstream, mostly because the
PlayStation 2 emulator uses the legacy emulation framework, which is
marked as not to be developed further.

I should give it a try, but I'd rather not as long as I haven't
checked that the reception code behaves just like the real hardware
(and I'm not risking frying my motherboard again for that RXD pad...).

> Is the interrupt hardware similar to any of the other MIPS based
> NetBSD or gxemul targets?

On the CPU side it seems to work just like any other MIPS IV
processor. The interrupt hardware itself is a bunch of memory-mapped,
status/mask interrupt registers with hardwired sources, seems classic
for its time too.

There's code to handle it in the trunk, in a heavily bitrotted state.
I also started gathering documentation about the hardware, and I have
a basic (and hopefully correct) layout of those registers, if anyone's
interested.