Re: Cromwell patches for FreeBSD support

Hi!

On Jul 25, 2005, at 2:29 PM, Rink Springer wrote:
> Over the past week, I have been working to get FreeBSD working on an
> XBox. This has been successful, and it works like a charm [1]. Patches
> will be released tomorrow, for 5.4-RELEASE and hopefully 6.0-BETA,  
> along
> with dmesg(8) output and such.

Excellent. When you release it, Slashdot as well as similar sites  
will certainly pick up the story, so be sure to make use of the  
momentum you are going to gain. You could well use it to
* promote the positive sides of FreeBSD
* promote Xbox hacking.
For the latter, I would suggest you include a link to xbox-linux.org  
as well as to http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/ 
Porting_an_Operating_System_to_the_Xbox_HOWTO , in order to motivate  
others to port more operating systems to the Xbox. (Personally, I was  
looking at NetBSD during the last few days, but it seems to lack  
graphic text mode (VESA-like framebuffer) support on i386, so I  
changed my goals into getting a text mode up first.)

While you are looking at http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/ 
Porting_an_Operating_System_to_the_Xbox_HOWTO, please also correct  
any mistakes you might find and add information that you needed to  
port FreeBSD.

Perhaps you might even want to write your own article about your port  
on our site. And we will certainly link to your project/patches in  
our news.

> [1] The framebuffer is fully supported, same goes for sound and USB
>     devices (such as an USB keyboard for the console). Only ethernet
>     is missing, currently, as FreeBSD lacks support for it. The binary
>     only driver in /usr/ports/net/nvnet fails with an error 5, for  
> some
>     reason.

Strange. Xbox-Linux had been using the binary nvnet driver for a long  
time, and I have also seen it being used in other projects in its  
binary form.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to motivate the community to port  
(i.e. rewrite) the "forcedeth" open source nvnet driver for *BSD (as  
nForce PC users also need it and the open source driver is said to be  
a lot better than the closed source one). Maybe the Xbox Linux  
Project we could give away a free Linux- and FreeBSD-enabled Xbox as  
a bounty; but I am sure that we could lend one to someone interested.  
This is also information you could add to your news text. :-)

   Michael