From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <45427616dfeeac8239866d30aed7d071@collyer.net> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] missing compilers? From: Geoff Collyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 13:44:28 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: d56b537a-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 The powerpc compiler is there but no binary is supplied, so you need to compile qc, qa and ql yourself. I have inferno running on OS X. It's still got some quirks and seems to work better on 10.2 than 10.1. A Plan 9 port needs at least a driver for the relevant Ethernet controller (Apple's GMAC is built in to the Power Mac, as I recall). For pre-VGA console access, it appears that one needs to use Open FirmWare's console get and put routines since recent Macs don't seem to have an accessible serial port. Keyboard and mouse are normally USB, which sounds like a pain. It looks like there is a z8530 DUART connected to a modem chipset, but the only external connector is a phone jack. I'm not sure which interrupt controller and MMU are used, but all this information should be available in the Darwin or OpenBSD sources. The supplied VGA is usually ATI or Nvidia. Disks and CD-ROMS are normally IDE. On the other hand, the Power Macs at least have several PCI slots, so one could perhaps get an initial port running quickly by inserting cards that already work on the PC, for example Intel i82557 Ethernet or Mylex SCSI. One can substitute Wavelan PCMCIA cards for Airport cards. The Open FirmWare boot loader can load AIX XCOFF binaries, which it appears ql can generate. As far as I know, qc doesn't exploit Altivec instructions, so you probably won't see much advantage with a G4 as compared to a G3. 3rd edition contains an mpc port and 4th edition contains an mtx port. One of them is probably a reasonable base to start from, depending mainly on MMU and interrupt controller.