On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 07:13:44AM -0500, Noah yan wrote: > How about CHRP compitable? I just start reading the chrp spec. I may not > completely correct or whether recent machines are built from chrp standard. > >From my impression, if PPC machines (not only Mac and Pegasos) are chrp > compitable (hopefully), it would be good to have a standard port. > Is CHRP still used in the new machines, including Mac and Pegasos ? How > much compatible of the hardware are with the chrp spec?
Indeed, altough chrp per se is a quite old standard, and some of it is now obsolet, the common denominator is still there. I wonder what will happen once apple moves to x86, but both Genesi (pegasos and future hardware) and IBM do use chrp. Notice that we have a port usable even for smaller systems, and it could be used down to the embedded market which was posted about earlier. > As far as the starting point, much of the Solaris source code is common to > both > SPARC and x86. Where hardware-specific issues come up, it would make more > sense > to base the VM code on the x86 code due to the fact both PPC and x86 use > similar > VM mechanisms (page tables whose entries are automatically inserted into the > TLB > on a miss). Likewise, it would make more sense to base the boot process on > SPARC's boot process, given both SPARC and PPCs boot using OpenFirmware, > though > there is something to be said for making GRUB2 the booter for PPC. grub2 indeed uses the chrp/OF stuff to work, which is why it works on IBM, Apple and Genesi hardware, but will not work as is on uboot or other implementations. Genesi has donated a machine to one of the grub2 guys, which is in big part why grub2 works so nicely on powerpc. Friendly, Sven Luther
