[SunRescue] any 3B2 users out there?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, March 20, 2001 at 18:18:50 (-0500), Dave McGuire wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [SunRescue] any 3B2 users out there?
>
> On March 20, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > Once I dreamt of porting NetBSD to it, though now I think I'd like to
> > just have a copy of the latest System V Release 4 (preferrably with
> > full source :-) fall into my hands somehow....  I love old hardware, but
> > I hate old software!  :-)
> 
>   I'm not sure a NetBSD port would be possible.  I remember reading
> somewhere that the 3B2 architecture MMU doesn't support paging, which
> I believe is something all of the BSDs would require at a very basic
> level.  Anyone else have more info about this?

Not to worry -- the WE32000 processors are basically a slightly
modernised 32-bit VAX architecture on a chip.  There's more MMU support
than you really need.  It was, after all, a chip designed specifically
for running Unix and only Unix; and they run SysVr4 just fine too (which
has an early version of the newer SunOS-5 VM).

(I do have the processor manual :-)

The only hard part would be interfacing to the "firmware" loaded into
the various device adapter cards.  Even source licensees did not receive
source for the firmware or for its development system (most "modern" 3b2
cards have on-board 80186 CPUs), and mostly not even device drivers
either.  That would mean keeping the same firmware and trying to figure
out what the API for the driver was.

Other than that it would be pretty much a piece of cake (once you did
the pmap and such, of course).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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