At 11:59 AM +0100 on 26/1/2000, Martijn van Buul wrote:
>
> Alohas!
>
> No, I won't ask why my Performa 5200 won't boot NetBSD. I allready know
> why. However, if there's anything I could do, I'd be glad to be of
> any help (Provided that it's possible to cross-compile kernels neatly on a
> Wintel-box - Sorry. Don't have another Mac at hand..) (Said box currently
> runs FreeBSD, but installing NetBSD 1.4/i386 isn't a very big problem)
>
> Yes, I do have programming skills :)
>
> I do have one question though:
>
> From a hardware-point of view, these machines much more resemble a M68K
> Mac than a "decent" PowerPC mac. Wouldn't it be a better idea to hack
> m68kBSD into working, instead of adding NuBUS and non-OF support to
> the PowerPC port? I assume that this has been asked before, but I couldn't
> really find it on the archives of this mailinglist on www.netbsd.org.

Having done quite a lot of investigation into this, I think it's safe to say
that both the 68K port and the PPC port are sufficiently different to
NuBus-like Performa hardware to make the job quite difficult. Certianly,
the reliance of OF in macppc is a big hurdle and would require some
major changes. I can't say exactly how difficult the mac68K port
would be but it wouldn't merge well to the code simply as they aren't
68K powered .

I know there may be objections to this suggestion but perhaps these
machines are different enough to warrant their own fork?

Another problem is the rather severe lack of documentation on
these machines.

Matt Browne