Hi, James,

The short answer is ``not until after 1.3 is out''.

The long answer:

>I have an old 5400 sitting about languishing under Ultrix and I wondered 
>if anybody was working on the Pmax port to it.  According to the web-page 
>the port would be "trivial" when the Vax 3900 series was ported, which 
>has since taken place.

I confess I wrote that.  It means I can see where all the pieces need
to go, and if locked in a room with the 5400 hardware, an another
DECstation to compile kernels on, it'd take maybe two days to cut-and-
paste together a kernel.

However, the bad news for 5400 support is that the autoconfiguration
code in NetBSD/pmax is being ripped out and rewritten to interoperate
better with the TurboChanel code on the Alpha.  That's an absolute
pre-requisite to getting <bus.h> and the bus-dma interface implemented
properly on TurboChannel machines.

This is all very good stuff, and when it's done it'll be even easier
to glue support for the Q-bus machines into NetBSD/pmax.  But adding
5400 support won't be doable until after 1.3 gets frozen, at least.

Also, now we have a machine-independent interface for bus I/O and DMA,
the right thing is to get both the vax and the decstation Unibus/Qbus
code to use it.  That will take a while too.

>I would be willing to work on it, however I am a student with rather 
>limited programming experience.  I would be eager to do anything I could 
>to facilitate the 5400 port.

Perhaps after 1.3 is out, we can see about trying remote debugging
of experimental kernels.