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NetBSD Ported to Motorola MVME PowerPC Boards

Posted by timothy on from the and-my-alarm-clock dept.

hubertf writes: "NetBSD/mvmeppc is a new port of NetBSD to the Motorola MVME PowerPC Single Board Computers. This was made possible through a donation by Gan Starling of two (plus one loaner) MVME160x boards so that a porting effort could be made. Due to NetBSD's highly portable architecture, the operating system was up and running multi-user after just two weeks worth of part-time effort. A NetBSD/mvmeppc specific mailing list has been set up for people to discuss any issues with running NetBSD on their MVME PowerPC boards, and a snapshot of NetBSD/mvmeppc is also available for anyone wishing to experiment with the new port. Steve Woodford is the NetBSD/mvmeppc port maintainer."

18 comments

  1. Why? by Stigmata669 · · Score: 1

    Maybe I am just being a troll, but why put in the effort to port BSD to PPC when Apple has provided a perfectically good (yes i know not free) distro to the PPC already, with optimizations. It seems to me that alot of work in the open source community is wasted in redundant projects. Stig.

    --
    Yawn.
    1. Re:Why? by T-Punkt · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, you are a troll...

      Or you simple don't understand the article.

      Apple may provide a "perfectically good (yes i know not free) distro to the PPC" (I guess you mean Mac OS X) - but only for (not that old) Apple computers It won't run on anything else. And it probably will never.

      And honestly, Mac OS X is neither targeted nor suited for the kind of application this Motorola MVME PowerPC single board computer is designed for...

    2. Re:Why? by Snowfox · · Score: 2
      Well, you are a troll...

      Or you simple don't understand the article.

      Apple may provide a "perfectically good (yes i know not free) distro to the PPC" (I guess you mean Mac OS X) - but only for (not that old) Apple computers It won't run on anything else. And it probably will never.

      And honestly, Mac OS X is neither targeted nor suited for the kind of application this Motorola MVME PowerPC single board computer is designed for..

      I assume he means Apple Darwin, not Mac OS X.

      Whether Darwin can or should be ported to this hardware, I don't know. Perhaps someone who knows more about the advantages and disadvantages of the Darwin/Mach microkernel architecture, compared to the monolithic NetBSD kernel for this hardware's intended use can say more.

    3. Re:Why? by T-Punkt · · Score: 1

      Ermm, but "not free" and Darwin doesn't match IMHO so he must have ment Mac OS X.

    4. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Darwin is not a real microkernel system. Darwin's kernel, xnu, is a BSD uberserver on top of a mach microkernel. As there is only one server and it's hardwired to the microkernel (everything is linked into one very monolithic kernel image), this gives neither the flexibility of a proper microkernel system nor the speed of a monolithic. NetBSD is infact more flexible and modular due to it's kernel module support.

      Oh, and NetBSD's been running on the PPC for ages. Only the port to this particular board is new.

    5. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NetBSD has run on Macintosh desktop computers since the early '90s and is a great Unix for those systems. VME bus computers are not common in desktop applications. They generally run headless, without much in the way of user interface.They go into things like sensors, heavy-duty communications equipment or cable boxes. To my knowledge, there is not an extent BSD or Linux distro that supported these machines previously.

    6. Re:Why? by anarkhos · · Score: 0

      Huh?!

      Darwin has kernel modules, WTF are you blabbering about?!

      --
      >80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
      >life
    7. Re:Why? by Listen+Up · · Score: 2, Informative


      Okay, whoever modded you up to +3 doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Apple makes a BSD based distribution called "Darwin" and it IS completely FREE. Porting this OS would make a helluva lot more sense than porting NetBSD to this platform. The only reason to do it with NetBSD would be to waste redundant effort making NetBSD work on yet another platform instead of taking excellent, existing technology and making that work instead.
      But, then I guess there is Linux, QNX, Windows, Solaris, etc. for Intel, so whatever, right?

    8. Re:Why? by NuShrike · · Score: 1

      Well, NetBSD already has PPC ports, and they're usually one of the first to port to a new and different platform.

      Linux does the same.. Isn't the philosophy the more the merrier (and more parallel evolution)?

      After all, OSX absorbed a lot of NetBSD (besides FreeBSD) code into it initially because of NetBSD's previous efforts on the PPC. Same idea here.

      Besides, I see very little reason for anybody to port the more complex Darwin to this new platform because of all the optimizations done for the not-quite-fully-compatible Apple platform.

    9. Re:Why? by Harpagon · · Score: 1
      This is not really true. NetBSD may be the first on Motorola VME PowerPC boards but OpenBSD, NetBSD and Linuxare running on the previous versions of those VME boards based around the Motorola 68000 series of processors.

      NetBSD is not completly on new grounds here [they already had PowerPC and VME code]. For the kind of application these machine runs, having a free OS alternative will be more usefull to companies than having something using a restrictive licence like Linux and Darwin.

    10. Re:Why? by Dahan · · Score: 2
      Yeah, you do sound like a troll. You've got your timeline backwards... why did Apple make the effort to port BSD to PPC when NetBSD had provided a perfectly good (and free) distro to the PPC already? The first NetBSD release for Power Macintosh was in May 1999. MacOS X came about two years later, March 2001. (Well, okay... MacOS X Server was released in March 1999, but that's just barely earlier than NetBSD. Both were in development at the same time...)

      And like other posters have mentioned, the MVME boards are nothing like a PowerMac. MacOS X isn't going to run on 'em anyways.

  2. Re:*BSD is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At Dow Chemical, we use NetBSD exclusively for our engineering workstations. This is 13,500 stations, or roughly ten times your estimate at Dow alone.

  3. Not as free as Free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But Darwin is under the APSL, whereas NetBSD is under the far less restrictive NetBSD licence.

    If I were choosing between the 2, I'd pick NetBSD. Less legaleeeeeeeze to figure out the license.

    So it depends on how free you want your Free to be FREE.

    (and, we can bring in some GPL advocates to point out that neither choice is fREEeeeeeeee. Weeeeeeee!!!!)

  4. Re:*BSD is dying by sedawkgrep · · Score: 2

    can't we filter out these damned "XXX is dying" posts? JEESH.

    --
    Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
  5. VME board? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why bother? Moto is so behind the times. Where's the PPC System-on-a-chip? Where's the (affordable) PPC ATX-compatible motherboard? Why isn't Moto furoiusly scheduling embedded processor seminars (the way Microchip has done for years) pushing the PPC? Why isn't Moto HOSTING a Darwin OS or application site? Eh...they've probably got a BBS you can dial-up.

    Look at the TIVO: great embedded design with a PPC that runs Linux. The processor is not clocked at gigahertzes (it's something like 50Mhz), doesn't have a gigabytes of memory (32MB or something), and stores video on ordinary IDE drives (well, slow, low-power IDE drives are preferred).

    Lesson to be learned here.

    P.S. Intel isn't much better. If it wasn't for the Microsoft monopoly, Intel would be probably be peddling a 16+24 bit architecture (16 bit addressing with 24 bit wide segment registers).