Sender: current-users-owner@netbsd.org

Quoting Giles Lean (giles@nemeton.com.au):
> 
> > I know there is work on a HP9000/700 port, and I can't believe they
> > are that drastically different that a port can't be dragged out of
> > it.
> 
> You underestimate HP's inventiveness. :-)
> 
> The main challenge to a 800 port is the different busses that have
> been used over the years; documentation is not publicly available for
> some of these, including the HP-PB bus used by the G70 Peter Eisch
> mentioned.
> 
> I recommend that anyone who is interested in a PA-RISC port start by
> looking at the documentation that has been released by HP for the
> PA-RISC Linux port.  There's a good overview of which machines are
> targetted for support:

Quite true.  I have a ancient (5yr old) 9000/F10, which is
unfortunately an 817 (IIRC) CPU.  While I would keep 10.20 on it as a
secondary boot, I too would love to get NetBSD on it.  However, near
as I can tell, HP has yet to release the information on the bus and
from what I hear probably has no intention to do so due to the immense
amounts of propritary and NDA information in what internal docs they
can still find.  From what I can tell, here are the critical docs we
are still missing (at least as of a few months ago) for just the
simple F10:

    - CPU bus
    - Backplane bus
    - I/O module (which includes the console, SCSI and ethernet)

The one thing I do have information on is their boot loader format,
for which I had written a program which understood about 80% of the
information on my HD and 10.20 install CD-ROM.  However, when I
started working at my current employer (a large firm recently in the
news), I stopped working on this lest it get tagged as IP.

- Doug