Subject: NetBSD for BeBox?
To: None <port-powerpc@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com>
List: port-powerpc
Date: 10/03/1996 23:05:18
I jumped with excitement to see this new mailing list!  I am a happy BeBox
owner who loves BeOS, but would be even happier if I could run NetBSD too. 
To me, Linux is just a toy, after having seen FreeBSD and NetBSD in
action on other platforms, I don't really feel like running Linux on my
BeBox (my personal opinions, of course).

Anyway, how many people are working on a PowerPC port of NetBSD?  What
platforms are planned to be supported?  If BeBox isn't planned, I would
like to help make it supported (it is very similar to a PReP system,
except with dual processors, a different bootstrap, additional I/O
ports, and a lower price!).  Are you working with OpenBSD on this (because
I sent mail to Theo asking about the OpenBSD/PowerPC link, and he
forwarded me to Michael Shuldman, who wants to port, but doesn't have a
BeBox yet)?

Once we have NetBSD running on a single CPU of the BeBox (and of course
any other PPC systems you plan to support), then it would be really cool
if we could get some primitive SMP support going.  FreeBSD has some
patches for SMP Pentium systems, which may be a good starting point.

Anyway, sorry to ask so many questions right away, but I wanted to get the
list going, and get an idea of who is involved.  I'm sorry to say that I'm
not a very expert kernel hacker, and have even less free time to devote to
this project (between schoolwork, JPL projects, BeOS programming and
writing a BeBox book!), but I'd be happy to at least test alpha versions
of the code and provide BeBox-related PPC input.  And I have a FreeBSD
system next to the BeBox, and a NetBSD SPARC at work, suitable for
cross-development purposes.

Good luck on this port, everyone!  BTW, I will repost this message in
about a week in case nobody sees it (I assume not many people have found
out about this list yet to subscribe)...

-- Jake