I just wanted to check in and see what was currently going on with the MIPS
port. I have a personal interest in possibly helping out on this since I
*may* get 2 DECStation 5000's from a local company who traded in for Alpha
based boxes, but DEC never bothered to pick up the old CPU's. The are the
older models which feature the R3000 but my interest is not in the processor
specific kernel areas as much as the device drivers (primarily ether and SCSI).
I don't know what the differences in the R3k and R4k's was, or how significant
those differences where (is this just a 68000 vs 68010 type thing?). I have
experience with DEC ethernet controllers at the hardware level but more
importantly a general interest in seeing this project fly. I don't know
if it is taboo to mention this in a Linux crowd, but you might consider
"peeking" at the 4.4BSD device drivers for any of the DEC specific
controllers. It would at least reveal critical addresses and other mask
tricks that might not be easily available in documentation.
I have a P90 running a 1.2.1 kernel (at least, maybe newer) which I can work
from. The 5k boxes don't have floppies so I don't know what I can do short
of setting up my old VAXStation 2000 to be a MOP mom (but that might be
tough since I don't have a licence for ULTRIX -- someone forgot to purge
the disk when I got it -- and I don't know if MOP was installed on the disk).
If you have gotten SCSI going, I could build a disk on my intel box and slide
it over. I don't know ...
I'm just looking for an update, or some guidance on where I might get
involved. These two machines would be the only MIPS boxes have access to.
I am just one guy, with a few free nights a week, but I would like to
help.
Scott
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Scott D. Brown Associate Scientist
Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Laboratory sdbpci@cis.rit.edu
Center for Imaging Science PHONE: (716) 475-7194
Rochester Institute of Technology FAX: (716) 475-5988
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