Re: PPC port to Amiga's with PowerUP or other PPC cards

[is%beverly.rhein.de@localhost (Ignatios Souvatzis)]

Hi Matthias,

> In article <42119246%phoenix.owl.de@localhost>,
>       "Frank Wille" <frank%phoenix.owl.de@localhost> writes:
> > Why? Once the PowerPC was started (by a special loadbsd/gobsd) and
> > had relocated the kernel, we can ignore the 680x0 completely. Or
> > am I missing something?
> 
> No. According the author of Phase 5's PPC software the PPC can access
> the Amiga's complete memory area. So a NetBSD-AmiPPC could works without
> any 680x0 stuff. But IMHO it should be signed in a way that 680x0
> binaries can be executed in a kind of emulation like e.g. the Linux
> emulation of the i386 port.

Er...

thats much easier, IMO. 

It certainly would be cute to have the companion cpu run m68k binaries,
but I predict that the difficulties:

- synchronizing caches on cross-cpu context switch
- translating syscalls (ok, the fake-netbsd-m68k kernel would solely
consist of the syscll translation mechanism)

will prevent its easy implementation. 

Its much easier to just recompile the stuff for ppc... and the resulting
binaries will be much faster, to the very least by a factor of 150/50 ==
3 (except for very pathological cases).

Regards,
        Ignatios