On Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:50:50 +0100, tobias.netzel wrote:

> The NUPowr G3 upgrades for the PDS slot are working without any problems in
> Linux.
> They worked with MkLinux and as Raylynn wrote his own one is also working
> with the monolithic Linux kernel.

That's good to hear.

> So I think the Linux kernel will use the CPU that actually performs the jump
> into the kernel code.

Initially, yes, but after that, the kernel has the potential to do
anything it wants. It would be possible to put code in the kernel to
choose a CPU, and such code is already there for certain other machines
that are not directly related to this project.

> And it seems that the NUPowr PDS card remains active when the BootX
> bootstrap enters the supervisor mode in the 68k emulation (and by that trick
> also gets into PPC supervisor mode) while with the Sonnet card(s) this
> procedure reactivates the 601 CPU.

If that's true, then I would guess (maybe very wrongly) that Sonnet is
using a Privilege Exception handler as the only means of access to the
upgrade CPU, in which case such code from Sonnet must be duplicated in the
Linux kernel. It would be great if Sonnet had some kind of
developer-support contact that Linux pioneers could address. If that
doesn't happen, the ideal would become the clean-room reverse-engineering
of Sonnet's code. However, I doubt that we will ever have enough people to
accomplish it in that way. It would be repugnant to intentionally add code
to Linux that anybody derived from their own personal disassembly of
Sonnet's code in direct defiance of their license agreement, which should
only be proposed as a last resort, if even at all.



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