Re: MOL

[Michel <mic...@ii...>]

Samuel Rydh wrote:
> 
> I'm currently considering porting MOL to other platforms
> than Linux/PPC (primarily *BSD and Darwin).

Time for a name change? ;)

> Before doing that however, I though it might be nice to have it working on
> APUS.

Thanks for thinking of us! :)

> The recent changes to MOL removes almost all assumptions
> about the kernel. As far as I can tell, the only thing that
> prevents MOL from working on APUS systems is the nonstandard
> KERNELBASE stuff.
> 
> So, I have a few questions:
> 
> - Does the BK kernels at fsmlabs contain working APUS support?

I doubt it. Only Jesper Skov used to have BK write permissions but he's been
out of APUS development for about a year. Roman Zippel would be the worthiest
successor, there's been some discussion about that but I don't know if
anything has come out of it yet.

The authoritative source for APUS is our CVS tree where Roman integrates BK
after each minor version bump. The current is 2.4.3.


> - Any special quirks? In particular, why is the kernel
> *not* located at physical address 0?

Because the memory starting at 0 is so-called 'chip memory' shared with the
custom chips and thus very slow. The kernel resides in 'fast memory'.


> - Which cpu flavors are used? MOL currently lacks 603(e) support,
> but I intend to add support for this processor shortly.

We have 603e and 604e so far.


> To be able to add APUS support, I obviously need help with
> testing and debugging since I don't have an APUS box.

We've been constantly hit by questions about when MOL was going to work on
APUS so there should be a lot of people who'd like to test it. :)


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)    \   Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc) developer
CS student, Free Software enthusiast   \        XFree86 and DRI project member