JavaStation support

Valeriy E. Ushakov has announced experimental support for JavaStation-1 and JavaStation-10 systems with patches to -current. His patches add support for netbooting, keyboards, mice, and X. See the JavaStation status for the current status of JavaStation support and the location of his patches. [0 comments]

 

Improvements in Acorn NC support

Ben Harris has modified the "ne at podulebus" driver to work around a bug in the MX98905 chip used on EtherI and EtherN cards, so they can now be used on NetBSD. He has also tweaked the vidcvideo driver to find screen modes correctly on the ARM7500. Between them, these allow an NC_WSCONS kernel to come up multi-user, with a proper display.
Ben is now working on getting X up and running on his Acorn NC. [0 comments]

 

NetBSD/amiga now has two-stage booter

Michael L. Hitch has updated NetBSD/amiga -current to have a two-stage booter.

The first stage is bootxx_ffs (for ffs boot partitions) or bootxx_fd (for bootable floppy disk). These locate, load, and execute the second stage loader boot.amiga. The console screen is created and passed to the second stage loader.

The second stage loader uses loadfile() to load the kernel image, which can be either a.out or ELF format, and can also be compressed (via gzip(1)). It will load a kernel file from ffs file systems or the ustarfs used on floppy disks.

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NetBSD/acorn32 created

NetBSD/acorn32 split off from NetBSD/arm32 and is now maintained by Reinoud Zandijk as part of the ARM team. [0 comments]

 

file(1) recognizes Amiga icons

The file(1) command in NetBSD-current has been taught to recognize Amiga Workbench icon (.info) files and their basic types. This is not a NetBSD/amiga specific, but NetBSD/amiga users will most likely make use of this. This change is scheduled to be in the NetBSD-1.6 release, and will furthermore be available in the generic file for Unix distribution maintained by Christos Zoulas. [0 comments]

 

MI softintr(9) implemented

Matthew Green has committed changes to switch the NetBSD/sparc port to the generic MI softintr(9) interface for software interrupts. [0 comments]

 

Minimal Econet support

NetBSD-current now includes minimal support for Econet interfaces. At the moment, there are no protocols implemented on top of Econet, so its usefulness is rather limited. This will change. [0 comments]

 

NetBSD/pmax switched to MI SCSI

Simon Burge has switched NetBSD/pmax -current from the old pmax MD SCSI support to MI SCSI. [0 comments]

 

Support for noncontinguous memory

Michael L. Hitch has committed changes to NetBSD/pmax so that it uses the PROM bitmap, if available, to determine available memory. Also added was support of multiple memory segments so machines that allow mixed memory sizes can utilitize all available memory. [0 comments]

 

NetBSD/pmax now has GENERIC_SOFT_INTERRUPTS

Thanks to Tohru Nishimura, NetBSD/pmax -current now provides the generic software interrupt mechanism. [0 comments]

 

ec(4) driver

A new driver for the 3Com 3c400 Multibus Ethernet card is available. [0 comments]

 

NetBSD/mvme68k now using MI mk48txx TOD-chip driver

Steve Woodford has split the nvram/rtc functionality away from the clock interrupt code in NetBSD/mvme68k -current. It now attaches to mainbus0 as `timekeeper0 at mainbus0'. Additionally, MI mk48txx nvram/rtc access functions are now being used.
It should now be very easy to add a character device for the benefit of userland access to NVRAM. [0 comments]