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Re: Darwin & the briQ (and other PPC computers)

The guys at Total Impact are open to working with people on the port. They
offered to loan me a machine if I would do it, but I am too busy, and
thought it might be a conflict of interests. I did some initial reserach,
here is what I recall.

It uses an IBM CPC700(CPC710?) northbridge, new driver necessary.
It uses some wierd ethernet controller (made by western digital?) again,
you need new drivers.
The serial ports might be able to be made to work with some modifications
to the current serial driver (the same mods necessary to get it working
with intel I would think).
The IDE controller may need a new driver, though you *might* be able to
hack up the intel ATA driver enough to work with their southbridge.
BootX is only going to require minor mods (things like keymap issues,
etc).

I have not seen the system memory map, but I assume it is pretty
reasonable.

Louis

On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, Josh de Cesare wrote:

> Andre,
> I don't think any non-Apple PPC machines are currently
> supported. The steps needed to add support are straight forward.
>
> 1) Booting:
> Apple's BootX should not require many changes to run on
> system with non-Apple Open Firmware. These machines should be pretty
> easy on which to boot the kernel and load drivers. Non OF based
> systems are going to be a challenge.
>
> 2) Kenrel:
> As long as the booter successfully loaded the kernel and
> drivers, there should be no need to change the kernel at all. The
> only hardware assumptions the kernel makes are: physical memory is
> contiguous, the frame buffer, if present, is linear and found by the
> booter, and the processor type is 603x, 604x, G3 or G4. Supporting
> processor would require kernel changes. Usually minimal changes.
>
> 2) Drivers:
> Depending on the architecture of the hardware, more or less
> drivers will be required. PCI based systems may be able to leverage
> existing drivers. Here are some of the kinds of drivers that will
> need to be written:
> IOPlatformExpert subclass (IODTPlatformExpert would probably
> work on Open Firmware machines).
> A Host Bridge driver. The AppleGracklePCI driver might just
> work on MPC106 / MPC107 based systems.
> South Bridge driver. Might be able to use on from Darwin on
> x86 project.
> Video Driver. You are pretty much on your own here... Only
> really needed to support mode changes.
>
>
> This is no small amount work, but there are lots of examples
> between the many Apple systems Darwin supports.
>
> Josh
>
>
> At 8:49 AM -0400 7/21/01, Andre John Mas wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> > Many of you probably read slashdot and saw the article on the briQ. Although
> > the computer is designed to run Yellow Dog Linux, I was wondering whether
> > the Darwin project would be ready to support non-Apple PPC based computers?
> > Does Darwin support IBM RS/6000 machines?
> >
> > Andre
> >
> > BTW the link is:
> >
> >http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/21/1229227&mode=thread&threshold=
> >1
> >
> >--
> >mailto:email@hidden
> >_______________________________________________
> >darwinos-users mailing list
> >email@hidden
> >http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwinos-users
> _______________________________________________
> darwinos-users mailing list
> email@hidden
> http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwinos-users

References: 
 >Re: Darwin & the briQ (and other PPC computers) (From: Josh de Cesare <email@hidden>)



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