On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 09:35 -0700, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> 1. It seems like both Linux and NetBSD don't work in 64 bit mode on
> these CPUs, although I think Linux is ahead a little. It's not
> especially important to have 64 bit support I think, but it seems like
> someone would have done this by now. Is it particularly difficult to
> do on this CPU or something? Maybe this question belongs on the mips
> list.

I once tried it with debain (home brew kernel) on my qube and my sweet
purple box went totally bananas. However I recall somewhere in my memory
that the gentoo-port for qube had 64bit support and it was supposed to
work (can be mistaking though), didn't try it since the install was to
complicated / time consuming for what I use my qube for.

> 2. Even though the Qube has a PCI slot, it seems like there are a lot
> of things that are not included that could be as far as PCI devices. A
> USB/1394 card comes to mind. USB support doesn't exist in cobalt for
> some reason. Is there a reason for this? I tried to get it working at
> one point and I added in includes to the USB code, and the onboard USB
> adapter was recognized as well as my card, but I don't know how to
> make device nodes.

For this part (I'll just presume netbsd still works mainly like linux ;)
*flame flame :P*) isn't hotplug needed ? So it will recognize your
usb-hardware ? 

> 3. We seem to be playing a balancing act between what the firmware
> will load vs. what the bootloader will load. I'm pretty sure that the
> bootloader will load a kernel of pretty much any size, so why not let
> us have more options for the cobalt kernel? Just a thought.

I thought they had to mislead the bootloader so it thinks it's still
loading the original kernel ? (Can someone correct me / fill in on it ?)

Cheers, 

Janko