ylo@ngs.fi (Tatu Ylonen) (01/12/91)
Since people were talking about porting unix to pc532, we felt that it
is time to say something about the work here...
I and a few other people here ({jvh,kivinen,pipe,jtp}@niksula.hut.fi)
have been porting Mach 3.0 for the pc532. The port is still underway,
but we have the mach 3.0 kernel running on the pc532. Initialization,
memory management, interrupts, scheduler, serial driver, symbolic
kernel debugger etc work as far as we can test at this point. The
kernel boots until it tries to open the paging file and load the unix
server. (In Mach 3.0 the kernel is small (~ 250k including symbols),
the unix emulator is a separate process, and each unix process has a
small emulation library mapped to its address space for user-mode
system call emulation.)
The unix server and unix emulator compile and link successfully. Most
of the C-library is done, but some of it is still unfinished. The C
library is needed to compile /etc/init, /bin/sh and rest of the
binaries.
We haven't yet been able to test the unix server and emulator, as the
scsi driver is still unfinished.
The port is based on the i386 version, and we are using an i386 system
as a cross-development environment. We have gcc, gas, ld, ar etc as
cross-compilers for the ns532. The compilers seem to work fairly
reliably now. We have scripts which will automatically reboot the
pc532, download a kernel, save it on disk and boot it. We also have a
10-digit led panel attached to the system, which is used to show
information about the internal state of the system (interrups, traps,
system calls, "heartbeat" etc).
The work has been on hold for a couple of weeks, but will be
continued soon as we have time.
Please don't ask for the source or binary or "when will it be
available". At the moment the information is: "it isn't available".
We are not willing to do the byrochracy of checking licences at this
point, so please don't ask. However, there is some hope, as the Mach
3.0 kernel is (as far as I know) free or about to be freed. The unix
server is not free and requires unix source licences. I have heard
rumors of CMU releasing some unix emulator, and that the GNU project
would be writing something (if someone has authoritative information
on this, I'd be glad to know). Also, as far as I know, GNU is basing
its kernel on mach 3.0. (But don't trust my information).
We will let you know if and when we can give something out.
Tatu Ylonen <ylo@cs.hut.fi>