This is a rather new port. It supports some types of machines with PowerPC processors in them -- but not all. Even though there are standards committees trying to resolve the problem, there are significant differences between various PowerPC computers, even when made by the same vendor! This port will run on some machines, but not on others. Check the list below.
To work, a machine MUST have some variety of OpenBoot firmware!
The processor support is quite stable at this point. Driver support is currently somewhat limited, due to most PCI devices only having been tested on little-endian machines. Additional device support for Macintosh hardware systems is under development any programming information for any recent Mac hardware would improve this situation.
The following processors are supported: 603, 603e, 604, 604ev, 750.
The port does not yet use real device drivers. It uses OpenFirmware for all device driver needs: console, disk, ethernet. It can be installed from netboot, floppy and network or cdrom. Netroot support exists, but is untested. The port has two versions of the kernel, one which only uses openfirmware for all devices, and a version that has been coded to support some MCG PowerStack and VI series machines.
Known working hardware:
Hardware support under development:
Machines that DO NOT WORK.
The powerpc specific portions of the kernel came from the NetBSD port by Wolfgang Solfrank. The userland and build tools came from an independent and incomplete port by Dale Rahn. Hopefully pieces from that other port will be merged, device driver support for interrupts and some real driver support. The conversion to the Wolfgang port was done because it was running multiuser and the other port was still single user out of memory ramdisk (no fully working device drivers).
After that work was done Per Fogelstrom added support for the VI Power4e vme board, removing openfirmware device support in the processes. (2.3 release)
For the 2.4 release, support for the openfirmware devices were added back in a compatible fashion such that mixed ofw drivers and hardware drivers could be supported. After that was finished, the power4e support was adapted to work on the MCG PowerStack machines. Dec 21040, and some vga support was added, vga cannot be used as console yet, but can be used as a terminal. No X servers are supported, but the mechanism to access vga via mmap exists.
For 2.5 support continued at the previous level as 2.4.
For 2.6 support an offical release was not made for the powerpc port. Work on the iMac had started and compiler loader issues had not been resolved which prevented the system from building out of the tree.
Post 2.6, iMac support has been added, further development is underway to support the imac devices better and add support for other systems. Initally with the imac driver support, compatibility with older systems was lost. This is primarily due to a lack of testing, these systems will be supported once the system changes are backported.
Contact Theo de Raadt or Dale Rahn if you are interested in working with other people on this, or need more information.
www@openbsd.org