On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 12:35 -0800, Daniel Gimpelevich wrote: > 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. > More data on this. For the m68k port the DayStar PDS cards will work (I believe the onboard ROM activates the card early in the boot process, no software driver required), but the Sonnet cards have the same problem we experience. I was a party to an email exchange about 2 years ago between a Sonnet engineer and one of the m68k Mac developers where the Sonnet engineer was attempting to get us the information needed to activate the card. After a few exchanges the Sonnet engineer stopped responding. There is some support for the very early Sonnet PDS cards in the Penguin m68k booter, but the newer cards do not appear to work the same way.
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