Subject: Re: m68k port
To: Mike K <the_one@ameritech.net>
From: Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>
List: tech-ports
Date: 05/09/2002 12:22:25
On Tue, 30 Apr 2002, Mike K wrote:

: I am interested in porting netbsd to the ti89 (and maybe ti92+) texas
: instruments graphing calculators.  The ti89 has a motorola 68000 (no FPU
: i believe)

Or MMU.  Without that, you're in for one hell of a ride; NetBSD doesn't work
on machines without a MMU at the moment.

: 10 MHz processor and  512 kb of memory.

512K is very tight for runtime; I don't think you'll fit a *usable* NetBSD
into that, even after tackling the MMU issue.  (You might be able to make it
print stuff to the screen, but forget a shell prompt.  8-)  If "memory" here
is something like flash storage, and there's more *RAM* memory, this might
be more feasible.

I don't mean to discourage you, of course, but there are classes of hardware
that are best suited to particular OS's.  For a machine as you describe,
there are other "embedded" OS's (designed for the smaller footprint, which
don't necessarily scale well to larger hardware) that would be more
appropriate.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  Wasabi & NetBSD:  Run with it.
-- CDs, Integration, Embedding, Support -- http://www.wasabisystems.com/