Re: NetBSD 10.1 on Acer PICA - Success !

[Michael <macallan1888%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello,

On Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:22:57 +0100
sadness <vampire%ipv7.net@localhost> wrote:

> Finally found the time to put my Acer PICA-61 board into a decent case.
> Tested NetBSD 10.1 on it, with great success !

Nice!
I've been looking for something like that for about a decade now...

> Installed from cdrom, let the installer create the 2Mb FAT12 partition 
> for the bootloader, and it's now happily booting from disk, going into 
> multi-user, and everything seems to be working fine.
> I've just completed some small task on it, unpacked the pkgsrc (took 3 
> hours), build some small packages, unpacked the source and it's now 
> building it's own kernel.
> It is slow (I was expecting a bit more speed out of of an R4400 clocked 
> at 150Mhz) but it is working !

Compilers there days are monstrosities, with only 64MB RAM gcc is going
to spend more time swapping than anything else. Also, I don't see
anything about L2 cache in your dmesg.

> I'd like to have X running on it but I'm not sure there's any support 
> for anything more than the vga console for it's ancient S3 805 videocard.

The S3 driver can probably be convinced to treat it like a VLB device,
except the X.org folks removed ISA and VLB support a while ago. It's
not hard to put back though, I've done it for xf86-video-chips so we
can run X on rev. 4 sharks.

have fun
Michael