OpenBSD/powerpc


Status:

A snapshot for the powerpc has been made available. This is still rather preliminary and should not be considered finished, it is currently about beta level.

The port does not yet contain real device drivers. It currently uses openfirmware for all device driver needs, console, disk, ethernet. It can be installed from floppy and network or cdrom. Netboot and netroot support is there but untested.

Currently known working hardware include the following Motorola machines with OpenFirmware, PPC1bug firmware is known not to work:

Other machines that should work but are untested: Machines that might work but are unlikely, PPCP class machines. Supported processors: Machines that are close to working: Apple PowerMac systems with at least a 603 processor and OpenFirmware. The Apple implementation of OpenFirmware does not support loading of ELF executables (like the boot-blocks for this port), so this issue must be resolved.

History:

The powerpc specific portions of the kernel came from the NetBSD port by Wolfgang Solfrank. The userland and build tools came from an independant 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).

Contact Theo de Raadt or Dale Rahn or Allen Briggs (for powermac) if you are interested in working with other people on this, or need more information.


OpenBSD www@openbsd.org
$OpenBSD: powerpc.html,v 1.10 1997/02/02 06:30:15 briggs Exp $