Peter Bruin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> has already gotten a ppc port close to working. Details were on bug-hurd.
I have incorporated most of Peter's changes and done some others myself to get the port close to building. These changes are mostly in libc, and I've done them only in the 2.3 codebase (the head of glibc cvs, which is not recommended for Hurd/x86 use right now). I have already gotten new powerpc-*-gnu* target support into GCC. Using the current gcc sources from cvs, you can trivially build a cross-compiler for the ppc-gnu target (or whatever alias floats your boat). This is what I have been using to hack on ppc hurd and libc code (which I haven't done in several weeks). You'll need binutils that grok the target, for which any powerpc-linux or powerpc-elf target should do ok. There are two kinds of porting issues in the libc and hurd code to be dealt with here. First is simply the ppc architecture support, which is mostly there and fine now. Second is the support for the microkernels that you might actually have on a ppc machine. Peter Bruin worked with OSF Mach, which is the microkernel used by MkLinux. This microkernel is not all that different from Mach 3.0 (the interface we use), and most of the changes to work with it are already done in libc and hurd (install the Mach headers from osfmk/mklinux to build libc against and it will figure it out). Unfortunately, I cannot run osfmk/mklinux on the ppc hardware I have at home. I have a powermac 7500/100 that the mklinux booter can't grok, probably because it has some sort of CPU replacement card in it. I also have a newer macintosh (g4 that has usb only and no adb), and osfmk does not seem to support that flavor of hardware at all. The other kernel around is Darwin (the free kernel part of MacOS X). Darwin works fine on my newer mac hardware. But the interface has changed a lot more and there will be a fair bit more work in hacking libc/hurd to deal with the Darwin flavor of Mach interfaces than for osfmk. Darwin is not really Mach any more, it is a modularized monolithic kernel that is a bizarre combination of OSF Mach, FreeBSD, old NeXT weirdness, and entirely new subsystems Apple has written for MacOS X. I see no sign that anything they run on Darwin actually uses Mach IPC at all, so who knows if all the Mach interfaces that appear to be there actually still work. I did begin some hacking on making libc/hurd deal with the Darwin version of the Mach interfaces (which is both source- and binary-incompatible with osfmk), but there is a bunch more crap to be done. I could help out somebody who wanted to try that, but expect a goodly amount of work. _______________________________________________ Help-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-hurd
