New NetBSD Port: NetBSD/pmppc

jschauma writes "NetBSD has been ported to yet another platform: NetBSD/pmppc, Artesyn's PM/PPC board. By my count, this is the 58th port!"

Go NetBSD

[Huge Pi Removal]

It's how I first learnt a load of *nix skills, by putting NetBSD on an old Mac. My best wishes to the team...

Re:58th port?!?!

[perry]

FreeBSD's "ports" are ported software, not platforms FreeBSD runs on. The terms are different.

(And yes, NetBSD also has thousands of ported applications -- we use a system derived from the FreeBSD ports mechanism.)

Why a new port?

[Bert64]

Why not adapt an existing ppc port to operate on this new architecture, or is it so wildly different to other ppc implementations?
Afterall, surely the m68k based Amiga with a PPC co-processor is one of the strangest implementations of a ppc architecture...

Re:Why a new port?

[augustss]

Well, none of the existing ports were really that close to how the pmppc looks. The pmppc ports shares most of its code with other ports, of course (that's the whole point).

Re:Why a new port?

[Anonymous Coward]

While it may seem "easier" for the average person to consider the Amiga and the Mac68k machines just "one M68K port", in reality other than the CPU itself there are drastic differences in the hardware. Memory on the Amiga may start at location 0x000000, whereas on the Mac's it may start at 0x100000. Different disk controllers, different video...

Some code ("pmap" code, for instance) is shared between both ports. Each I'm sure has a pile of very specific drivers for the various devices. Amiga uses some bus interface (I'm not an amiga person, so I don't know what), while the Mac68k's use NuBus. The code that generally gets shared is the basic MMU code (the same for any 68k system), or pretty much anything specific to the CPU but not the surrounding hardware.

Its like saying I have a Honda 4-cylinder, and you have an old Caddilac 8-cylinder. Hey, they are both internal combustion engines, why can't you just "adapt" your 8-cylinder engine into my Honda?

Yes, reasonably, you might be able to adapt the gas tank to fit... and maybe the plugs would fit, or the alternator... but only bits an pieces. The 8-cylinder engine probably just isn't going to "fit" for the smaller car (or for the different system in this case).

Re:58th port

[bigBlackSabbath]

I think you miss the point about Net BSD - no matter what hardware you have, it'll probably run Net BSD.
I inherited some POS Dell server at work with some adaptec scsi card that wasn't supported by Free BSD. I grabbed my trusty Wasabi CD ROM (thanks to sizzla...) and I had a DNS server in no time.
Whenever I get weird hardware I want to use, I go for Net BSD....