OpenBSD/i386

History and Status:

The i386 port has some architecture specific changes from the NetBSD/i386 port, but the major ones are:

• the addition of ISA bounce buffer support so that ISA scsi cards (ie. Adaptec 1542) can be used in machines with more than 16MB of memory.
• The same one GENERIC kernel works on all machines, whether it has BusLogic or Adaptec scsi cards.
• some APM and PCMCIA support (3c589, NE2000-clone, and COM ports)
• some DDB improvements
• OPTI mcd support
• ATAPI cdrom support
• P5/P6 improved NTP support
• pccons has userland replaceable keymaps, and screen blanking
• boot "-a" support like other ports (asks for root partition)
• floppy formatting
• Cyclades Cyclom serial driver
• faster (assembly) IP checksumming (typically 20% faster, up to 62% faster in some cases)
• vmstat -i prints information.
• latest rev of 2940 driver

Where to get it?

Snapshots are made available from time to time:

• ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/i386
  located at Rutgers University, eastern USA.
• ftp://ftp.ibp.fr/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/i386
  located in France.
• ftp://hal.cs.umr.edu/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/i386
  located in University of Missouri-Rolla, mid-western USA.