Erik C.J. Laan wrote: >Which takes us back to the start of the thread again, where Rick Genter >asked (though on debian-68k only, so you might have missed that):
>".... I'd like to volunteer to help make the PowerBook 540c a >first-class Linux citizen. My question: where would my efforts be best >applied? 68LC040 support? Nativing booting? Somewhere else? " >And I mailed that native booting was already being worked on >(emile.sourceforge.net), so my suggestion was to work on LC040 support >and SCSI-DMA for 53c9x-based Mac's because I think these progress in >these areas will do the most to help Linux/Mac68k. As I already wrote I >meant to suggest Pseudo-DMA, and you added some >5380-based-still-PIO-mode models like the IIfx to the list, so I hope >Rick is not to much overwhelmed by all this ;-). Not at all. >From the various e-mail threads, I think I understand - what's lacking in LC040 support (supporting a page fault the fetch of a floating point instruction that itself will generate an exception); - what's lacking in native booting (look at the EMILE project); - what's lacking in SCSI support (pseudo-DMA for 53c9x-based Macs). Question for the lists: does it make sense to pursue a software floating point solution as opposed to trapping floating point instructions? My guess to the answer would be no, as I suspect that 99.9%+ of the code that runs in Linux (both in the kernel and in userland) does not use floating point, but if that's wrong, I'd be interested in hearing opposing viewpoints. Rick
