OpenBSD/romp

OpenBSD/romp is an effort to port OpenBSD to the IBM 6150 and 6151 machines, also known as RT/PC. These machines were IBM's first try into the workstation world, in 1986, and are the ancestors of the RS/6000 machines of today.

A (very quiet) mailing list dedicated to the OpenBSD/romp porting effort is available at romp@openbsd.org. To join the OpenBSD/romp mailing list, send a message body of "subscribe romp" to majordomo@openbsd.org. Please be sure to check our mailing list policy before subscribing.

Table of contents

• History of the port
• Current status
• Project list

History:

Mark Dapoz and Roger Florkowski ported a mix of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD to the romp in the late 1980's, for educational sites not wanting to run AIX on their machines. This port was named ``AOS''.

The code eventually was released to the community in the late 1990's, with uncertain license terms. People on the list started to play with the code, fixing bugs in it, making it compilable with gcc, and slowly filling the gaps between the 4.3BSD era and modern times. This is still a very quiet work in progress...

Current status:

There is currently no code publically available, however, people are working on code and patches flow privately or on the list from time to time. Contact Miodrag Vallat if you want more information.

Projects (in no particular order):

• Fix romp backend bugs in gcc
• Write code for binutils supporting the romp, rather than fixing the romp-specific as and ld; eventually, move to ELF
• Get hardware documentation