NetBSD-current for openmoko GTA02

Peter Tworek tworaz666 at gmail.com
Sat Dec 17 16:29:31 CET 2011


On 12/08/2011 07:15 PM, Nick Sheppard wrote:
> On 06/12/11 23:11, Peter Tworek wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> For some time now I've been spending some of my free time on getting
>> NetBSD running on my Freerunner.
>
> At last someone bringing NetBSD to the Freerunner!  I've been waiting
> for the day when I can point to my phone and casually say "Of course
> it runs NetBSD ...".  Thank you!
You're welcome :).
>
> I'm only a tinkerer myself, but some years ago I enjoyed getting
> NetBSD running on an old Blue & White Mac G3. I was really impressed
> by the enthusiasm and helpfulness of the NetBSD community, and by
> their mission to make it run on every possible hardware, down to
> toasters if possible. 
What, I really like about NetBSD is the code and documentation. While
hacking on linux kernel when I wanted to learn something, I've always
ended up spending enormous amounts of time on digging trough mailing
list archives, some random web pages, text files under Documentation/
etc. I've usually found what I wanted, but the whole experience was
tiresome. With NetBSD I've never had any problems with finding valuable
information in the manual pages.
 
> It always seemed to me that the Freerunner would make a great project
> (if I only had the time and the skill). So I'm really happy to see
> what you're doing.
Well I can't promise that this project will ever be as usable as linux
is on the GTA02. I'm afraid that there is still enormous amount of work
to be done on this port. I also don't think I have the necessary skills
and time to do it all by myself. I'll probably continue working on it as
long as it's fun, but can't promise anything more.

> One question now - what about the GTA04?  Looking at NetBSD
> development, it seems that people are already working on ports to
> current OMAP and BeagleBoard type hardware.  Does this mean that a
> port to the GTA04 would be relatively straightforward?  Or is this too
> good to be true?
I doubt I'll buy GTA04 myself. The hardware looks nice, but at this
moment it's a little bit above my price range. Maybe this will change
over time...

Porting NetBSD to GTA04 is certainly doable. As you've said there is
already some sort of support for OMAP boards in NetBSD, so it should be
just a matter of getting it to run on GTA04. I guess that with the debug
board working it should be a couple of days of work to get the kernel
booting. After that however, all the drivers for GTA02 peripherals that
NetBSD doesn't support have to be written. This is probably the most
time consuming task.

>
> Thanks again for letting us know what you're doing,
>
> Nick Sheppard
>
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