> I was wondering if anyone has thought about making LinuxPPC work with
> the NuBus Macs now that we have BootX? I haven't personally looked at the
> kernel code too in depth to know what may be involved, but I think that
> since BootX can work with MkLinux, having BootX feed LinuxPPC the needed
> info to work on a NuBus Mac wouldn't be too much effort.
> The reason that I am suggesting this is because of the added speed
> benefit of not having the Mach kernel would be kinda nice on the older
> boxen. I am also asking this because I can probally get a G1 ;) Mac
> pretty cheap and it would be pretty nice to hack around on it.
It's possible but also a lot of work. NuBus PowerMacs have lots of
design difference, they use older Apple chipsets more like 68k. There
may be some good things to take from the mac68k port of linux.
Mach source code is definitely a good source of infos about the machine,
but lots of things will not be useable "as-is", Mach is quite different
from linux.
There is nothing like the device-tree but there are the NuBus
declaration ROMs. In a first step, it should be possible to make
pre-built device-trees with all the HW infos hand-coded in them, and put
them in the bootloader or in a modified BootX.
I don't have time to work on such a project (and I don't have a NuBus
PowerMac neither) but if anyone is interested in working on this, I will
be glad to provide necessary support in BootX.
--
BenH. Web : <http://calvaweb.calvacom.fr/bh40/>
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