G'day Tim,RS64 is pretty different to Power especially where the MMU is concerned. The boot process is nothing like RS/6000 prep or chrp platforms, there's no SMS on my machines, no serial console .. IPL control is via push-button menu, about 3 mins into the boot I get output on the 5250 terminal emulator which is embedded on a twin-ax conroller, attached to a virtual dial-up modem on the windows controller machine side (in this case an old gateway laptop which runs the iSeries Access Software). It took me three years just to round up sufficient hardware (and the right hardware! *eyeroll*) and software and about 200+ brute-force attempts to install i5/OS. I still have little clue what I'm doing half the time.
If you wish I can send you soem screen shots of an install over the weekend, you'll see what I mean with this thing.
I have a quad northstar system at 262mhz with 1.8gb primary storage and a uniproc Pulsar at afair 450Mhz with 384mb primary storage. I've not got access to anything older like an A10. I also have another 9406-170 because they're as common as fleas on a dog and seem to pop up for 5-10$ on ebay. They're a uni-proc version of the quad machine and I found to be a good starting point. Mine has 896mb ram and 4x4gb disks.
On a side note, one thing I've been trying to find more info on is the way RS64 does memory management between primary and secondary store (chip memory vs DASD (disk)). If you find out anything to read on this I'd be keen as mustard to also see it. I initially wasted a few weeks trying to replace the only working disk which I naively thought was "a vanilla 2gb IBm SCA SCSI disk" with a nice 72gb 15krpm scsi disk (Quantum atlas III?). I really didn't get very far and later found vague references why and after a brief chat with another enthusiest it led me down the path of discovering that the drive I inserted was not a 520byte compatible disk. I assumed this was a typo and blundered on for another week until I saw the 520byte reference in a few other places. I re-queried the chap and he mumbled something along the lines of "no, not 512byte data blocks.. the extra 64bits is used for both 'tagging' and memory mapping."
The penny dropped with a resounding clang. OS/400 and later i5/i6/i7OS appears to allow mapping of a region to either primary or secondary store at the hardware level and "storage" as a whole relates to a flat concept between data and code where "libraries" and "objects" are concerned. There is a 'shell' of sorts that pretends the libraries and objects are directories and files but it doesn't give access to large portions of the system.
It reminds me of how IBM's MVS and Fujitsu's MSP-EX (Which I use here at work) work with datasets on dasd's for RO, PS, SAM, VSAM, ISAM, etc .. but with memory paging built in and the OS is the dbase. Weird?
Anyway, this is where I'm blundering around at present. I wish these things could run NetBSD. That'd be great. Would love to work on it. I'm also treating this post as a positive troll hoping that someone far more knowing than I will chip in with details and 'set me straight' :)
Al. On Wed, 4 Jan 2012, Tim Rightnour wrote:
In the very least, I'd say fire netbsd up on them and see where it explodes. After that, a dump of OFW would probably be useful. I'd have to see where it went kaput before guessing on how hard it will be. On 04-Jan-2012 ..I'd rather be coding ASM! wrote:Tim, I'd be extremely interested in helping out with an RS64 port. I've a couple of AS/400's at home I mostly potter about in i5R3 and i5r2 on.--- Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost> NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS http://www.netbsd.org/ Genecys: Open Source 3D MMORPG: http://www.genecys.org/
-- -- Al Boyanich adb -w -P "world> " -k /dev/meta/galaxy/ksyms /dev/god/brain