Sonnet crescendo 7200 and OS4.1

[wawrzon]

On the PPC idea, I suppose I could contact Staff Verhagen, if he's still developing.

im not sure if i understand you well, but if you are asking for a ppc port of aros, there is one targetting sam computers. it appears to work, there appear to be problems with keyboard (driver) though. it has only been tested under emulation (qemu) lately, which also is at experimental stage for the platform in question. so ist difficult to tell how it behaves on the hardware. so far there has not been anyone interested in testing.

if you ask for aros support for ppc accelerators, i dont think there is actually interest rewarding such an effort. not to mention that this hardware is spectacularly rare.

[wawrzon]

No, I don't see the point of porting to accelerators.
Broader support of other PPC platforms would be nice.
The SAM460 is a little weak.

anyone who wishes to cotribute support and testing for further ppc platforms, or whatever else platforms, is certainly welcome.

But the idea of emulating the SAM460 via qemu still sounds cool.
What is the platform used for the emulation?

im usually testing it within linux virtual machines on my PCs, simply because i compile everything there, so it is most convenient. last time i tried i had also to compile qemu myself from current source as sam platform support has not been public yet. im not sure if this changed by now.

[wawrzon]

I've heard about running a SAM460 emu via qemu, didn't know they'd been trying to run AROS on it.

apparently aros is used for testing, as it runs on that emulation most reliably, in comparison to ng alternatives. it sounds strange but i cannot comment on this, as i have not tested anything else, neither do i intend to.

And I'm unsure why this fork is so underdeveloped.

this is not a fork. ppc platform is built from common source, same as x86, x64, arm or m68k. neither is it "underpowerded". so far as ive been able to test everything worked stale, except i couldnt use keyboard for input, which certainly limits my experience. but i have not noticed any particular problems. admittedly i have not spent much time with it.

[wawrzon]

what endian issues?

[wawrzon]

As to getting started with PPC AROS, right now all I can find are some dated ports.

what dated ports? ppc iso should be downloadable from aros nightly builds page:
http://aros.sourceforge.net/de/nightly1.php

Is there anything more generic?

what do you mean by generic? target hardware support needs to be implemented it wont happen magically. if you mean generic is ppc hosted on ppc linux or something like that, i dont know.

I'm fairly certain I can get an older version of GCC running if it's needed.

you should be able to compile aros along with ist toolchain on linux x86 no matter what host compiler, i dont know if anyone has ever tried to do that on ppc.
the instructions how to proceed are on aros Homepage compiling section:
http://aros.sourceforge.net/documentation/developers/compiling.php
i have lately written a quick summary of instructions on aros-exec but cant access it right now.

[wawrzon]

Found it in the docs, its a switch in the code during compilation.
They've actually documented this stuff fairly well.

ok, there is a set of macros/flags that get set depending on endianness of target platform. you shouldnt be bothered to mess with it usually. there may be some endian poroblems here and there, mostly saving or retriving data from a file, like wanderer o particular zune settings, which is known, but whether none cared or those who cared, like me, looked into it but werent able to fix it properly. this all is minor though. aros should generally work fine on ppc big endian, since it does so on m68k.

[wawrzon]

So, a really stupid question, can AROS be compiled to a hosted system with only the Linux kernel or does it need other elements of an OS?

i dont know the details how hosting works. certainly there must be some interfacing through x, sdl or alsa but i have never bothered with it as i have been using x86 and ppc mostly only as reference form m68k.

you should probably look at arch/all-hosted as well as other directories containing arch specific stuff. besides sam port there is ppc-native as well as ppc-morphos and ppc-all, most of which is probably not maintained if not abandoned since years.

now, building on ppc host you may actually come across endian issues. hopefully the needed packages are available at all. id look for some most popular and best supported distro, otherwise the Adventure will soon end in tears.

i advise to build outside of source dir together with the toolchain in one go. i describe it in my instructions i have linked to on aros-exec.

[wawrzon]

So, a really stupid question, can AROS be compiled to a hosted system with only the Linux kernel or does it need other elements of an OS?

ah.. maybe i misunderstood, you mean something like anubis, arix or amithlon? or that kind of amigaos on linux kernel people are fantasizing about? obviously not. otherwise it would be widely known.

you can probably though strip down your linux host to get out of the way as far as possible. except for packages and tools needed for compilation, but then it can all be done from bash shell.

[wawrzon]

arent you derailing your own thread now?

[wawrzon]

btw, this platform stuff eveb if folded out linearly in one dir is hierarchical, so sam ppc target may and pprobably will pull headers from ppc-all.

good luck and keep posted.

[wawrzon]

@wawrzon

who is the current maintainer for the PPC platform? if it's possible, i'd love to try booting AROS on my X5K, but am not familiar with doing this with our u-boot firmware. can you recommend anyone?

-- eliyahu

there aint actually any current maintainer for ppc. you could best register on aros-exec as iggy did, or even dev-ml. zoltan balaton who adds sam boards support to qemu and updated aros sam target visits the later. he is also in contact with tlsom from aw.net.

[wawrzon]

according to
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Aros/Platforms/Arm_Raspberry_Pi_support
rpi uses u-boot, so native aros must or must have been working with this.
as far as i see raspi-armhf nightly is still building in abi-v0 section. so the code might not be totally outdated. it everntually might need some changes, if you were inclined to compile abi-v1, which should imho be preferred default on any new platform.
the reason why im bringing up an arm device in ppc context is, that maybe bootstrap code could be borrowed from there with some endian fixes and such.

[wawrzon]

in fact ppc supporters would be quite welcome, as far as im concerned. i have made some progress compiling deadwoods latest odyssey source within aros toolchain. x86 works as expected. i have ppc compile untested (im rather sceptical if it will run and stable) and im two missing atomic functions away from linking an m68k executable(which i kinda know, will crash). but nevertheless it would be nice to have active ppc testers and contributors. the work could eventually improve also os4 situation.

[wawrzon]

Do you think the other operating system camps don't use version control or something* ?

that would actually be mandatory, but as they are closed its a bit hard to guess how it looks like. with os4, since apparently there are distinct individuals who actually own their code, which is part of the os, it might well be, that this code isnt hosted in a common repo, but only binaries are being delivered for a release. sounds bothersome to maintain, but would explain, why it is so hard to gather and deliver an update, even if some issues have been fixed and tested for years, as some members claim. similarly thor has complained, that it was a long way to get at least majority of os components building within one build system.

one way or the other. i cant actually tell as im not involved. with aros the particular bauty is, that you can actually compile the whole os, contributions and many ports with just configure and make. yu just Need to choose the supported platforms and your desired flags.

[wawrzon]

Having had access to the source repository in the past, I can confirm that the OS4 sources are maintained under version control. There really is no alternative when working on projects that size.

I was just bemused by Iggy's statement which made it sound like version control was some sort of revelation that only the AROS team used.

Yes, i imagine. Perhaps this is the whole reason for nda, as obligation towards individual developers. Dont disclose too much btw.