Hi.

Sorry to bother you again with my stupid questions. ;-)

What are the criteria for assigning a PPC machine to one of the various
PPC ports?
Macs and compatible =3D> port-macppc, OK.
? =3D> port-prep
? =3D> port-ofppc
Am I right in the assumption the port-prep is for all PReP compatible
PPC machines _without_ OpenFirmware?
And port-ofppc is for all PPC machines with OpenFirmware, regardless of
the actual machine architecture? I.e. all PReP machines with
OpenFirmware, CHRP (if we get suport for CHRP machines at some point),
???

The ofppc GENERIC kernel has only attachments for the generic ofw
devices. I.e. in theory such a kernel should run on any PPC machine with
ofw, as the hardware is only accessed via the ofw in a uniform way. In
practice this does not work due to firmware bugs, ... and that
port-ofppc is notoriously broken. ;-)
This limits device support to devices that are supported by the ofw.
There is no way on a unsupported ofppc machine to access the e.g. PCI
bus and use PCI devices that are unsupported by ofw, but supported by
NetBSD.=20

If port-ofppc knows about a speciffic machine and someone has written
the machine dependent code to attach e.g. the generic NetBSD PCI bus
framework to that particular hardware, this ofppc machine will support
any PCI device that NetBSD supports. Regarless if this device is
supported by the ofw of that machine. Therefore "struct platform". At
least I got this impression when I had a glance at the MD code for the
Firepower systems in port-ofppc.=20

OpenFirmware in general. Where can I get information about ofw? I looked
at http://www.openfirmware.com/ and found various supplementary
documents like bindings to platforms, busses, CPU architectures, ... But
it seams that I have to purchase a printed copy of the core ofw spec for
$$$. Obviously I don't wane pay $$$. Is there an other resource that
descibes ofw? (Beside NetBSD source code.)
--=20



tsch=FC=DF,
         Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/