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BSD Operating Systems Hardware

Experimental Micro Channel Support In NetBSD 10

Posted by Nik from the NP:-Boy-In-The-Bubble dept.
Looking for something to do with that old PS/2 in the cupboard? NetBSD can now be booted on it. Support is strictly experimental at the moment, and available as a patchset to the main code.
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Experimental Micro Channel Support In NetBSD More

Experimental Micro Channel Support In NetBSD

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  • uhh, no. From the installation-howto:

    The ISA, EISA, VESA Local Bus and PCI bus architectures are supported. The MCA bus architecture (found on IBM PS/2 machines) has been minimally supported since the 2.1.x kernels, but may not be ready for prime time yet.

    NetBSD may have started a bit later, but that's not quite significant in this case.
  • It's good to see MCA support. I had a few MCA machines I picked up around here for free; they were fairly nice for their vintage.
    MCA's a nice architecture; it's too bad that it's not in any more modern machines. (At least not Intel machines; though I don't think it's in any terribly recent IBM PPC machines, either...)
  • I have an IBM MCA machine. It's a P133 with 96 megs of ram, and three four gig SCSI hard drives. I got it for free from a local company. Runs OS/2 Warp fine.
  • I took it from the installation-howto from kernel.org (link on homepage). I figured it would be accurate. I am quite surprised that NetBSD didn't support MCA a long time ago, and I do wonder if it did once in the past.
  • Like I said...P133s with sufficient memory are workable, but not interesting enough to exploit some of the more interesting features of MCA.

    And OS/2 Warp? What are you thinking? :)
  • OS/2 Warp is what came with it. Runs nicely, Fast and stable. Good for it's vintage as well :) One of these days I'll get it an ethernet card and work on the OpenBSD MCA support.
  • Next, an AS/400 uses a memory model that is partly enforced by hardware, creating a control memory and a main memory. The software in the control memory (part of which can be swapped to main memory in some cases) provides an interface to applications and services that is very simular to a virtual machine. Because this is more or less enforced in hardware, there is no easy escape to facilitate a Unix style setup on this kind of machine

    The virtual machine interface is, at least as I read what one of the architects (Frank Soltis) of S/38 and AS/400 said in his book Inside the AS/400, implemented largely by binary-to-binary translation; compilers generate MI code, in a very high-level instruction set, and code in the OS kernel translates it to machine code (the 3x0-ish IMPI on the CISC machines, extended PowerPC on the RISC machines) the first time it's run.

    Whether this makes it possible to run OSes other than the "licensed internal code" (OS kernel) and OS/400 is another matter (although I have the impression that the "RS64" 64-bit PowerPC chip in some RS/6000's is one of the chips done for the AS/400, and just runs with tag bits turned off, so maybe it's possible).

  • So, the question becomes: how difficult is it to integrate that port into the PowerPC/Power distribution of NetBSD? Getting old 486's to run might be nice, but we have more than a few IBM RS/6000 workstations around here that are borderline cost-effective under AIX, but would be worth keeping turned on under NetBSD.
  • Yes! I've been desperately looking for an OS that's not Aix for Ibm RS/6000 power machines! Aix would be ok, I like it, but it's a matter of license. Hope this initial support will lead to a NetBSD/Power port.
  • Linux support for MCA bus machines has been around for _years_ and is stable and reliable. It's just that it only recently got into the main kernel tree. But now you can build your 2.2 kernel with MCA support and it Just Works. A lot of the MCA hardware such as ESDI, SCSI, XGA and network cards is supported too.

    AFAIK FreeBSD also has working MCA support. It's good to see NetBSD getting it too - at about the same time as it's being dropped from Windows NT. (Win2k doesn't support MCA bus machines.)

    If you have a PS/2 lying around in the cupboard, you have no excuse for not sticking Slackware on it right away. Also I'd like to insert a plug here for the newsgroup comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware, which is cool.

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