MTX604-010A status

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%mylinuxisp.com@localhost>]

Since I finally got some time and NetBSD/prep-current has once again
been building successfully, I figured it was time to give my much-
neglected Motorola MTX604-010A board some lovin'.

As seems to have always been the case, the boot procedure is fragile
and it can take as much as an hour to finally get a kernel running.
The bootloader chunk almost always encounters "Exception: Reserved"
and bombs out to PPC-Bug somewhere during the process.  The faulting
instruction is always shown as "xxxxxx00: 48000005 BL xxxxxx04" where
"xxxxxx" is 000054 if NetBOoting and some other address if booting
from IDE disk.  Every so often it gets "Floating Point Not Available".

Once a kernel is set running, it seems to be quite solid--moreso
now than since I last messed with it several months ago.  I used to
see the slide0 lose interrupts and hang the machine.  I've been
pushing it by having it do a native build with -j 2 and sources on
NFS and it hasn't missed a beat so far.

It would be nice to figure out how to make booting less/not broken.
Might have to dig at some of the ancient Debian stuff I have lying
around for ideas.  I don't recall it failing to boot.

Then maybe revisit how to get the second CPU running.  Again, some of
the old Debian stuff might give ideas--kernel 2.2.13, IIRC, had working
SMP on this box.  Just for the record, it appears that if one switches
active CPU in PPC-Bug ("RUN 1") before booting, the kernel bootload
seems not to run at all.

Or perhaps a side-trip into wscons (and Xorg) land(s).  My board has
a CirrusLogic CLGD-543x-based video card in it.  PPC-Bug knows how
to set up these cards for text mode and will use it if a keyboard is
present.

Somewhere in my Debian stuff I have "Xbh" which is an X server built
for penguin-OS on the Motorola BlackHawk embedded PPC boards which have
a CLGD-543x chip on board.  I could use it in 8-bit mode.  It could
almost work in 16-bit mode, but the display had vertical banding and
other distortions that made it unusuable.  Unfortunately the "Xbh" I
have is a monolithic binary executable only, but was supposedly built
from XFree86 3.3.0 "SVGA" driver sources, IIRC.


Well, that's where things are for now.

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