Re: NetBSD/luna88k

[Chris Hanson <cmhanson%eschatologist.net@localhost>]

Congratulations, this is all excellent news!

I don’t have a Luna but I do have a couple of Data General AViiON 88k systems and several bits of Motorola VME 88k hardware.

A few years ago I was slowly migrating the OpenBSD/mvme88k stuff forward for my own use, but building on real hardware was quite slow even with 128MB of RAM. I was still able to take the OpenBSD 5.5 to 5.6 changes from other platforms, apply those to the OpenBSD 5.5 mvme88k driver codebase, and build OpenBSD 5.6 for mvme88k. In some cursory testing it just worked.

I didn’t want to do something more drastic like go from 5.5 to 6.x because I was concerned about compatibility. Migrating to a new major version without intermediate steps could potentially make it much more difficult to track down any problems.

So if anyone wants to, OpenBSD/mvme88k could probably be revived “easily.” I can’t share my own work directly (thanks to employer’s rules) but I can say that if someone else were to try the same thing it should be very straightforward, just a matter of looking at diffs, applying changes, and rebuilding everything.

Similarly, once there’s general NetBSD support for m88k, it should be pretty easy to bring up NetBSD/mvme88k since a lot (though certainly not all) of the driver code will be shared with NetBSD/mvme68k — and since NetBSD shares more code across its codebase then OpenBSD does, there should be substantially less need to track down and reapply changes in making that work.

  — Chris