There has been a little bit of talk in the last few days about NetBSD
ports for the R3000 Magnum machines.

Since I have a couple of Mips 3230 workstations surplus to requirements I
looked to see if a port was available, and was surprised to find there was
none!!  Just a little bit of talk about them from time to time.

So - to cut a long story short, just over a week ago I started to gather
together some info with the intention of starting a port.  The Technical
reference manual that was supplied with the machine, along with info found
in existing RISC/os header files made me feel that I was able to get
NetBSD running.   Mips kindly supply the source code for most device
drivers with RISC/os which is very kind :-)

The PROM Monitor is directly capable of performing BOOTP & TFTP.  There is
also a set of PROM functions for stand alone IO that is fairly well
documented.  In fact it is almost a 1 for 1 copy of the PROM routines used
in the DECstation's
 
Progress to date is:
   - Build Cross compiler environment
   - Sort out netbooting of executables [ ecoff-bigmips ]
   - Start port of PMAX secondary bootloader which gets as far as opening
     the disk device.  Not essential for the port, but helps with ELF
     kernels.
   - Start a cut down kernel based on the NEWSMIPS port.
     Currently gets as far as wiring down the virtual memory map.

Since this work is being done in my spare time (which is limited) as well
as this being my first port to new hardware it will take some time to
complete.   I will have to take a break from it shortly as I'm off to
Europe until Mid July.

Once I have a Mips R3000 Magnum running I could turn to the more
challenging Mips 3350 machine which is VME based.  Some of the VME I/O
cards are sourced from 3rd parties which  supply technical info along with
the cards.

If anyone is interested in helping out getting a port up and running
please get in touch.

Wayne
--
  _____	   	Wayne Knowles,  Systems Manager
 / o   \/   	National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research Ltd
 \/  v /\   	P.O. Box 14-901 Kilbirnie, Wellington, NEW ZEALAND
  `---'     	Email:   w.knowles@niwa.cri.nz