Re: AmigaOne X5000

[Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hello,

On Sun, 19 Mar 2017 20:40:14 -0400
Al Zick <al%familysafeinternet.com@localhost> wrote:

> >>> Which kernel would
> >>> you suggest? Is there any hope of it booting, but only using one  
> >>> core?  
> >>
> >> You can always try. First you have to determine which kind of  
> >> firmware the
> >> system is running to boot kernels. Maybe some version of UBoot?  
> >
> > That would make things relatively easy - build uboot image, try to  
> > make
> > it talk to a serial port, proceed from there.  
> 
> Yes, it does use uboot.
> 
> FreeBSD has support for it. However, without video and you need to  
> netboot. What is interesting is that to create a uBoot image, you use  
> the NetBSD mkubootimage.
> 
> Is it possible to port their code?

Not sure, but it can certainly serve as additional documentation and
prior art. Also, it would be interesting to know what problems they ran
into and what they did about them.
Getting it to boot *something* shouldn't be hard - our build system can
spit out uboot images when asked to. That's what I did with CI20, I'm
not even sure we support any other uboot-on-MIPS configuration.
Does uboot use a serial port as console? It's probably some sort of
16550 workalike. If uboot used it then we don't even need to configure
it, just poke data into the send register.
Also, as Frank said, I'd try an e500 kernel first, I wouldn't be overly
surprised if there's some sort of backwards compatibility in newer
chips.

have fun
Michael