On Sun, 7 Jan 1996, Brian J. Johnson wrote:

> The Great Mr. Kurtz writes:
> Unfortuantely, the PowerMacs are not PREP-compliant (as you point out
> below, they are essentially quadras) and, apparently, Apple is less
> than enthusiastic about divulging their technical details.  The clone
> makers may or may not be bound by some sort of non-disclosure
> agreement, but they'd be worth asking.

The first line of PowerMacs aren't, but I thought Apple was moving to 
PReP compliance with the PCI macs.

Anyway, once it's running on a PReP system... heck, even getting it 
running on an RS/6000... it would probably only be a matter of driver 
patches to full compatibility.  Something tells me that once the quadras 
start working, the PowerMacs will miraculously and mysteriously start 
running NetBSD in emulation mode.

> > At least 
> > with the nubus PowerMacs, the internal architecture is nauseatingly 
> > similar to the Quadras, but with a few changes in the memory management 
> > and the display and its interface with the memory.
> 
> Last I saw, GCC and GAS could compile and assemble PPC code, but GNU
> ld couldn't link it.  Has this changed in the latest binutils?  I
> haven't checked.

I was thinking more of doing a GCC on an RS/6000 with a PPC 601.  It says 
it will compile on whichever architecture you choose (Power, Power2, PPC 
601).  I was thinking swap the includes with NetBSD's, rebuild the 
libraries, and compile the NetBSD kernel for PPC 601 based systems.  That 
is, of course, after the source is able to handle quadra.  The MMU will 
be a dog, though.  Also the booter code might have to be patched to throw 
the machine into native mode just before booting.

Thoughts on this?

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