OpenBSD/aviion

OpenBSD/aviion is an experimental port of OpenBSD to the Motorola 88100- and 88110-based AViiON systems manufactured by Data General.

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Table of contents

• History of the port
• Current status
• Project list
• Supported hardware
• Getting and installing OpenBSD/aviion

History:

In September 2003, Chris Tribo published some excerpts of the technical documentation for the AViiON series 400. Having a look at it, it was obvious these systems were built upon a modified MVME188 design, already supported by OpenBSD/mvme88k, but there was no interest in working on AViiON support at that time.

Then, late April 2006, enough boredom convinced Miod Vallat to start a port, even though he did not have access to any AViiON hardware, as a challenge. In two weeks, thanks to the help of Chris Tribo, a model 410 was running multiuser (but diskless) - a proof that this effort was worth continuing inside the OpenBSD tree. And work continues..

Current status:

All supported models (or with similar designs) should run multi-user (some of them do not support the onboard SCSI controller yet and need to run diskless), and currently limited to serial console. There isn't any disk bootloader yet, so the kernel has to be netbooted.

Projects (in no particular order):

• Disk bootloader.
• On-board SCSI support on series 400 and compatible models.
• Keyboard and video support.
• Test on as many different models as possible.

Supported hardware:

Supported machines

• 100, 200, 300, 400, 3000, 4000 and 4300 series
  These are the machines initially targetted by this port. Their design is close to the well-known MVME188 design, with different on-board devices; at the moment only the on-board serial ports and ethernet are supported.
  The only models tested so far are models 410 and 4300, but all the models in this series should work.
• 4600 and 530 series
  These machines are slightly different from the above series, but not too much, and documentation is available.
  Both the on-board SCSI controller and the on-board network interface are supported, but there are no disk boot blocks yet.

Unsupported machines

• 5000 and 6000 series
  These machines may eventually run as well, but lack of on-board device support might be a showstopper. Some documentation is available, but there hasn't been any work towards supporting them yet.
• 6280 and 8000-8 series
  Documentation is available, but there hasn't been any work towards supporting them yet.
• 8500 and 9500 series, and other 88100-based models
  These systems won't likely be supported unless documentation for them is found.
• 88110-based models (500, 4500, 5500, 8500+ and 9500+ series)
  These systems won't likely be supported unless documentation for them is found.

Getting and installing OpenBSD/aviion:

Snapshots are made available from time to time, in this location as well as in a few mirrors.

Here are the OpenBSD/aviion snapshot installation instructions .