At 11:09 AM -0500 1/5/00, Allen Briggs wrote:
>> well... its really really fast (for an '040) but if you ever need anything
>> like serial/console access you are screwed (if i screwed things up i had to
>> move the disk drive to a q700 and re-configure it there)
>
>Serial works now.  You still don't have ADB, floppy, or pseudo-DMA
>for serial (which should be possible, I believe).  I'd really like
>someone to take a look at this.  I haven't had a chance to look at
>it for ages.  :-(

It is definitely possible. I've looked at the linux-mac68k sources recently
and they do ADB, serial, and floppy via the IOPs. If you don't attempt to
reprogram the IOPs yourself the Apple supplied IOP software works on a
simple message passing protocol. Using those drivers as a "developers
guide" it should be easy enough to write our own.

I would imagine performance might be improved by reprogramming the IOPs to
use a deeper (greater than one) fifo with larger queue elements. Of course,
we'd need a 6502 assembler in the NetBSD distribution to do it but I think
that's the least of the problems associated with such a project :-)


____________________________________________________________________
 Michael Zucca - mrz5149@acm.org - http://www.mdc.net/~mrz5149/
 "I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose Freewill. "
  --Rush, Freewill
____________________________________________________________________