OpenBSD/mvme88k is an effort to port OpenBSD to the Motorola's 881x0-based VME motherboard family.
There is currently no maintainer for the mvme88k port, as it is not officially supported. The people working on it are Steve Murphree and Miodrag Vallat.
The Motorola 88k processor is said to be the best RISC processor ever devised. Its simplicity and elegance combine to make the mvme88k a hearty, robust platform.
Nivas Madhur started the initial mvme88k port for the MVME187 card, but has since moved on to another employer. The port was brought in the OpenBSD tree by Dale Rahn, but he did not have enough time to work on it. Steve Murphree, Jr. eventually completed the port to the MVME187 in November 1998.
Unfortunately, at the same time, a compiler upgrade from gcc 2.8.1 to egcs revealed a lot of problems in the mvme88k support in gcc, which could not be fixed in time for mvme88k to be a supported OpenBSD 2.5 release. As of today, these problems are still not entirely fixed.
The lack of an in-tree toolchain did not prevent further work on the port, and a lot of changes were made to the codebase, such as revamped autoconf and on-board SCSI driver, greatly expanded VME bus support, working install process that correctly creates a Motorola VID block on the disks, and support for MVME188 as well as improving support for MVME197.
The development of this port is currently stalled, while people are busy dissecting the mvme88k back-end of gcc and fixing the code generation errors.
Due to the compiler problems, no snapshots have been generated since a long time. There was a 2.4-current snapshot on the ftp mirrors for some time, which supports only MVME187 cards and can be used as a very crude basis to rebuild a complete system, for the adventurous hacker. If you want to get it, ask miod. Access to an OpenBSD/mvme68k system greatly helps, as both systems are very similar.
As VME hardware is quite uncommon in the average retail place, and Motorola 881x0-based hardware is even more rare, this section is here to satisfy the well-founded curiosity about the mvme88k hardware.
Pictures of a Motorola 900 modular chassis, with a 33MHz MVME187 CPU board, 32MB RAM, 4 MVME332XT serial boards, and an Archive 250MB QIC tape drive.
This is a dmesg of an MVME188 system.
Model: Motorola MVME188 25Mhz MVME188 board configuration #5: 2 CPUs 4 CMMUs CPU0 is attached with 2 MC88204 CMMUs CPU1 is attached with 2 MC88204 CMMUs CPU0 is master CPU [ using 146999 bytes of bsd a.out symbol table ] ddb enabled Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 1995-2001 OpenBSD. All rights reserved. http://www.OpenBSD.org OpenBSD 2.9-current (GENERIC) #59: Thu Jun 14 01:18:03 GMT 2001 miod@arzon:/src/current/src/sys/arch/mvme88k/compile/GENERIC real mem = 33550336 avail mem = 28381184 (6929 pages) using 435 buffers containing 1781760 bytes of memory mainbus0 (root) machine type MVME188 bugtty0 at mainbus0 addr 0xfff45000: bugtty syscon0 at mainbus0 addr 0xfff00000: rev 1 clock0 at syscon0 ipl 5: VME188 sclock0 at syscon0 ipl 5: VME188 nvram0 at syscon0 offset 0x80000: MK48T02 len 2048 dart0 at syscon0 offset 0x82000 ipl 3 console (ttya) vme0 at syscon0 offset 0x85000: system controller vmes0 at vme0 vs0 at vmes0 addr 0xffff9000 vaddr 0x2e59000 vec 0x80 ipl 2: target 7 scsibus0 at vs0: 8 targets sd0 at scsibus0 targ 1 lun 0: <FUJITSU, M2624F-512, M405> SCSI1 0/direct fixed sd0: 496MB, 1429 cyl, 11 head, 64 sec, 512 bytes/sec, 1015812 sec total vs1 at vmes0 addr 0xffff9800 vaddr 0x2e5a800 vec 0x82 ipl 2: target 7 scsibus1 at vs1: 8 targets ve0 at vmes0 addr 0xffff1200 vaddr 0x2e5b200 vec 0x74 ipl 1 ve0: address 00:00:77:83:9f:cc ve0: 128 receive buffers, 32 transmit buffers vmel0 at vme0 boot device: sd0 root on sd0a rootdev=0x400 rrootdev=0x800 rawdev=0x802