Subject: Re: NetBSD ported to MPC860 / MPC8260?
To: None <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: David Querbach <querbach@realtime.bc.ca>
List: tech-kern
Date: 01/07/2000 17:51:14
In regard to:
> > > Has NetBSD been ported to Motorola MPC860 or MPC8260 PowerPC architecture?
> >
> > ... or the MPC821/823, and especially the MBX860 and MBX821 development
> > boards from Motorola? (I was just about to ask the same question myself.)
>
Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> Hm. Aren't the 860/8260 the parts with the onboard quad sync seial logic,
> the "PowerQUICC" or some such?
Indeed they are. There are about a dozen different chips in the familiy,
with different on-chip peripherals and serial port capabilities. In the
family, you can find just about any serial protocol I've ever heard of
(including 10Mb/s and 100Mb/s Ethernet). Some chips (the MPC821 and MPC823)
even have LCD controllers.
Being targeted at the embedded world, however, they don't have hardware
floating point or the large-block memory mapper (I forget what this is
called, exactly). They do, however, have some cache and the small-block (4k
byte) MMU with a TLB.
> I'd be interested in hacking on a port to these, though I no longer have a
> commercial reason to do so (at one point I was working on an embedded
> device that seemed likely to have one of these as the CPU, and I still
> have a bunch of manuals at home somewhere I think).
Manuals can be had free from the Motorola website: www.mot-sps.com. You
fill out a web form, and they mail them to you.
and Jukka Marin wrote:
> I _may_ (don't know yet) be sub-contracted to help in a project based on
> MPC860/MPC8260. Everything's unknown at this point - it's not even known
> what OS will be selected - I hope it will be one of the BSD's (not linux).
> If this project is started and _if_ I get into it, I'd be interested in
> everything you do. ;-)
> Do you have any idea of the time line - do you need the porting job be
> done within a few months, for example? I'm sure I'll have no time for
> this in January, probably not in February, either. (Old projects taking
> up all the time..)
I'm not in any particular hurry; we're just acquiring a new technologies
(MCP8xx and embedded Un*x) that we think may come in handy. We've had a
couple of jobs recently that might have been simpler with MPC8xx/Un*x, so
we'd like to be ready for the next one.
I look forward to working with both of you.
Regards,
David Querbach
Real-Time Systems Inc.
P.S. Neither of your responses came through the list server. Is this as
expected, or should the server be adding a return-path field to the header?
I'm no expert in email, so I hesitate to roust the list manager myself.