FreeBSD 6.0 on Pegasos/ODW

[John-Mark Gurney]

Matt Sealey wrote this message on Fri, Jun 30, 2006 at 11:04 -0500:
> Why isn't there an ISA bus attachment?
> 
> We have an ISA bus on the Pegasos (Via 8231 southbridge)

Because FreeBSD's isa bus is still stuck back in the stone ages... It
still requires some magic isa_init function to be defined on a per
platform basis to setup the isa bus...  There is currently no provision
to have multiple isa busses on FreeBSD which means that isa busses
behind a pci bridge don't automagicly get attached...

I have the same trouble w/ sun4v's isa bus, but since there isn't any
important hardware on the T2k attached to the isa bus I have done
nothing to attempt to support it...

> In all honesty the design of the system should be that while it there is
> some grunt work required, it is much the same as in Linux - when the driver
> doesn't exist on PPC you just symlink it from the i386 tree since all of
> the hardware already works in FreeBSD on a PC. I used to run FreeBSD 5.1 on
> a Via EPIA board, it had the exact same southbridge and peripheral chips
> and ran like a dream. Endianness notwithstanding it should be the same
> way.
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Peter Grehan [mailto:grehan at freebsd.org] 
> > Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 9:52 AM
> > To: matt at genesi-usa.com
> > Cc: freebsd-ppc at freebsd.org
> > Subject: Re: FreeBSD 6.0 on Pegasos/ODW
> > 
> > > Building was a miserable failure. It went through and did the world 
> > > and then the kernel failed first because driver "zs" wasn't 
> > found (we 
> > > commented out zs and put the 16550 uart in instead) and then it 
> > > churned and puked on linking;
> > 
> >   The sio driver doesn't work on FreeBSD/ppc. It requires an 
> > attachment to a bus somewhere (there's no ISA bus 
> > attachment). I do have it sort-of working with the psim 
> > simulator (with an 'iobus' attachment), but you've just hit 
> > the fact that porting to a new platform with different 
> > hardware than Macs doesn't come for free - there's always 
> > going to be some development required.

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."