Re: AmigaOne X5000

Hello Frank,

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you. I was installing NetBSD  
on some servers at a data center about 7 hours away.

On Mar 4, 2017, at 5:38 AM, Frank Wille wrote:

> Al Zick wrote:
>
>> The AmigaOne X5000 is out! In fact, I have one. It seems fast, but
>> AmigaOS doesn't give it much of a work out.
>> [...] The author of this article believe like me that
>> NetBSD needs to be ported to the new PowerPC system. There must be
>> someone who can port to this system.
>
> Amiga/68k is probably the wrong mailing list, so I added port-powerpc.

You're right, I just didn't think anyone else would listen.

> The X5000 has a P5020, which is BookE e500mc. AFAIK we already  
> support e500,
> so it might be not too difficult to add. The situation here looks a  
> bit
> better than with the SAM 440/460, which are still lacking 440- 
> support in
> NetBSD (not mentioning the AmigaOne X1000 with its strange PA-Semi  
> CPU).

So, this sounds much more doable.

> Then there is also the Tabor A1222 with P1022 CPU (as I understand  
> this is a
> plain e500 core, which is already supported), which is about to  
> appear.

This even sounds more promising.

> I might be interested in working on a port, but I would need to buy  
> any of
> the new hardware models first, which is most difficult because of  
> space
> problems. ;)

I think I may have found someone who would be willing to donate a  
motherboard to a developer who can port NetBSD to it. If space is a  
problem, then I am not sure how this would work.


> So I am most interested in the new PPC notebook from ACube Systems,  
> which
> may be using a T2080 CPU (e6500 core).

I would really like to get one of these too. My G3 powerbook with the  
G4 (550 MHz) upgrade is really showing its age.

> -- 
> Frank Wille


What can be done to get things started?

Since we already have support for the e500 I would be interested in  
trying to boot a kernel to see how far it gets. Which kernel would  
you suggest? Is there any hope of it booting, but only using one core?

Kind Regards,
Al