Re: G4 support?

[Bill Studenmund <wrstuden%nas.nasa.gov@localhost>]

On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Brian C. Grayson wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 30, 1999 at 08:30:28PM +0200, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 29, 1999 at 11:25:04PM -0700, Erik E. Fair wrote:
> > > If you've got some G4 systems with OpenBoot Firmware, why not try to
> > > netboot a netbsd kernel on one and let us know how it blows up?
> 
>   I believe netbooting is out of the question:  by default, I
> believe the G4s can not mount from other machines (policy), and
> I do not have root on any machines.  The firewall would prevent
> using an external NFS server.  And I don't know if we
> have any spare disks handy.  I do have some old 127MB IDE disks
> (non-UltraDMA) at home that I could bring in, if the IDE
> controller won't choke on such ancient disks.
> 
>   I guess best bet would be a floppy-based test boot.  Can Mac
> drives boot off of an IBM-format disk?  (Yes, I'm showing my
> lack of Mac knowledge here.  But ask me anything about the
> Apple ][ disk encoding and I can probably answer it!)  I just put
> the 1.4 boot image on an IBM floppy, and will try it out on
> Thursday if I get a chance and an idle G4.

The boot image will completely replace the disk, so it will no longer be
an IBM format floppy.

Unfortunatly the new CHRP-ish OF doesn't seem to like our boot.fs much.
I'm working on other things to try. So please get in touch when you try
this.

>   If that works, I can bring in two 127MB IDE disks, one blank, and
> the other containing an FFS with the binary stuff (sets, etc.),
> and do a sysinst install from disk1's files to disk0.  (I'd be
> setting disk1 up from an x86 -- will "newfs -B be" do everything
> I need?)

I don't think so. I think you also need the disklabel on-disk to be in a
big-endian format.

What would work would be to just throw a filesystem on the whole drive.
i.e. wd0d on the i386 -> wd1c on the powermac.

>   If what I've written above would Not Work, and someone would
> be willing to walk me through everything, or point me to the
> appropriate docs (www.netbsd.org still seems down for me),
> that'd be helpful.

As above, I'm willing to help here. :-)

> > hopefully in a way which is supporting the PowerPC architecture definition,
> > which means it will magically work if our code was correct from the 
> > beginning.
> 
>   ... I highly doubt that G4 would violate the spec, so yes, if our
> code is correct, I expect things will work fine.  (One thing I've
> noticed about the whole PPC thing is that it seems to match the
> NetBSD philosophy of "Get it right the first time" -- witness
> AltiVec's cleanness vs. MMX + SSE ugliness!)
> 
>   I may try to convince my manager to allow me to work on
> NetBSD-powerpc bring-up for G4 (if I don't do it, I don't think
> anyone else will until it ships, at what point one of y'all could
> do it).  But as it is, I'm already backlogged with work, so I
> don't know if I'd be able to do much if it didn't Just Work.

Any effort will help. :-)

>   Random question:  does XFree86 work on ppc?  I've never seen
> anyone kick G3 or G4 boxes running Lin*x into X, and don't know
> if there's a good reason.

Yes, we use it. :-)

>   Brian (speaking solely for myself, not Motorola or Intel for that matter!)

Understood.

Take care,

Bill