NetBSD/atari todo list

Leo Weppelman, the atari port maintainer, has put together a todo list for the NetBSD/atari port. If you're interested in helping on any of these please contact Leo and/or the port-atari mailing list.

  • Adaptec2940 Support

    The new driver code does not work at all and the old driver code only works partially. The problem seems to be somewhere in the DMA handling. Matching the cards cache-line size and buffer alignment to the DMA burst requirements of the Hades does not work however. Since there is absolutely no cooperation from adaptec in supplying info, the solution probably depends on black-arts. I am playing with it every once in a while...

  • wscons

    Mostly ready for the Hades VGA part. The keyboard part is nearly finished, thanks to Thomas Gerner. Nothing has been done yet on the framebuffer (TT/Falcon) side of things.

  • VGA cards (non-Tseng)

    These pose a problem since I somehow these cards need to be tweaked into standard VGA mode to make them work on NetBSD. I have been working on this. Currently this is stalled. I am currently working a bit on this. I used an x86 emulator (ftp://ftp.scitechsoft.com/devel/x86emu/) in conjunction with a simplistic /dev/pci (to make pci spaces accessible in userland). I have the emulator working up to a point that is correctly runs the bios of my et6100 and S3Trio.

    It turns out that the Milan does not need this, the Milan-BIOS initializes the card to a pretty standard mode. On the hades with a Mach64, it is unusable. They removed the BIOS rom from the card.

  • NCR8XX PCI support

    I punted on this one. The old driver had so much interaction with main memory (both DMA and CPU), that it was nearly impossible to tell when to byte-swap and when not. I haven't looked closely at Manuel's latest driver, but this situation might have improved. However, I traded my 810 card for an et6100. Hopefully someone else can pick this one up.

  • Sysinst

    For systems with more than 4MB memory, I'd like to move to sysinst and a 1.44MB floppy image. Systems with less then 4MB must stay on a 1MB floppy image (memory constraint). I think they will have to do with the current minirootfs-install with networking ripped out. The latter is caused by a tendency for all tools to grow fatter over the years. I cannot make the program set of the 1.3 miniroot fit in 1.5 :-( This item involves the implementation of sysinst for the atari, create atari specific docu and test it.

    Update 11Mar. 2002: For small systems (works for bigger too), there will come a bootstrap using the swap partition. I already created a file2swap.ttp tool that transfers an image to a designated swap partitions. This lifts some size contraints for the miniroot. Setting up sysinst remains of course.

  • Milan I

    Although the Milan kernels are part of the 1.6 release, they are still experimental. Not all standard hardware is properly supported (like nvram).

  • Medusa T40

    Currently not supported. Porting efforts should be done by someone who owns one. I will help out in ideas and other secondary support, but I won't do the bulk of the porting effort.

  • Snapshots

    It would be nice to have snapshots out on a somewhat regular basis.

  • ACSI support

    This would be nice to have.

  • Generic softints

    Implement the generic softint mechanism.

  • Documentation

    There are a few items here. Most of them should be repeatedly run over.

    • Do a sanity check on the install and beginner_install documents. Do they still advise reasonable filesystem sizes? What is the impact of ahdilabel on beginner_install.

    • Check the FAQ. Are all items and answers still valid?

    • Do we have manual pages of all atari specific things? Which are missing?


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