On 5/2/08, Dennis Clarke <blastwave at gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 12:30 PM, <ewood at izoom.net> wrote: > > Would it not be a whole lot better to simply start making it work on G4 > > and G5 Macs right now? Then there'd at least be a working OS to port to > > something like POWER6 later on. > > The *whole* idea from the very beginning has been to get some sort of > port up and running to a point where we have a serial console and a > shell and some tools. That would be enough to allow community people > to keep on working. > > This process has been in a terrible state for years. Years my friend. > > We started with a community project with little or resources at Blastwave.org > > That then drew the attention of some people who brought in some heavy > hitting talent and $money$ into the project all working on a platform > that no one would ever be able to get again. The Open Desktop > Workstation from Genesi based on the PegasosPPC motherboard > http://www.pegasosppc.com/pegasos.php > > I have one of those little PPC processor daughterboards here now. The > motherboard stopped working a while ago and there will never be a > replacement because you can not get one unless you make it yourself. > So we have had the big time blow out of money and with the help of a > rock star consultant named Guy Shaw we have a pile of code that will > boot up to a point and then .. well there we are. Stuck with code that > is extremely locked to a platform which had great firmware and no one > can ever get. The EFIKA is not the same thing but it has nice > firmware also. Just FYI. > > To go forwards, again, we would need hardware that can be found > anywhere. Better yet, we would need hardware with a future. I am > thinking POWER6 gear from IBM of course. We do not want to go there > because we would need IBM engineers and millions of dollars in R&D > money to do the job. The rumour is that it took rocket science or > something more tricky, actual computer science, to get Linux working > halfway decent on the POWER6 gear because of serious time > synchronization issues in the kernel for multiple threads of execution > all running after the same blocks of memory. Please go look into the > TSO ( total store order memory consistency issues ) with references > like "Memory Consistency and Process Coordination for SPARC > Multiprocessors" : > > Memory Consistency and Process Coordination for SPARC Multiprocessors > Book Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science > Publisher Springer Berlin / Heidelberg > ISSN 0302-9743 (Print) 1611-3349 (Online) > > Also go looking for a paper by Arvind ( a one name guy? ) MIT CSAIL > and Jan-Willem Maessen ( Sun Labs ) about Memory Model and Instruction > Reordering + Store Atomicity and then more recent stuff at OpenSPARC > such as : > > TSOtool: A Program for Verifying Memory Systems Using the Memory > Consistency Model > Written by Sudheendra Hangal, Durgam Vahia, Chaiyasit Manovit, > Juin-Yeu Joseph Lu and Sridhar Narayanan > IEEE Int. Symp. on Computer Architecture (ISCA04), 2004. > > Really, a machine with a very well understood cache process and > detailed hardware docs is needed. > Good luck with that from the Apple stuff. > > So the IBM stuff looks better but you need IBM to play along. > > Or we get some money together and build some ODW units ourselves. > > Either way, my friend, can you spare a million dollars ?
It sounds very much that the powerpc port is dead, is it? Jenny -- Jennifer Pioch, Uni Frankfurt
