OpenBSD/pegasos

OpenBSD/pegasos used to run on the Pegasos I and Pegasos II systems.

The OpenBSD/pegasos port was discontinued after the 3.5 release.

There is no intention to revive this port.

Table of contents

• History of the port
• Current status
• Known problems

History:

The OpenBSD/pegasos port was started early 2003 when Genesi contacted Dale Rahn to port OpenBSD to their newly released motherboard. After several months of hiatus, with the release of the Pegasos II pending, Dale Rahn was hired by Genesi to revive the port.

Pegasos II support was added early 2004.

The bulk of the work on the pegasos port was performed by Dale Rahn, this work was terminated at the end of Feburary 2004 due to lack of payment on the part of Genesi. They claimed to have used up all of the company funding and were over 3 months behind in payment, 'We will get a big contract/sale any day'. At that point it was no longer possible for the developer to live without payment, so he stopped active work on pegasos and searched for other employment.

A few weeks later a second batch of Pegasos II boards were due to be shipped, with a new version of firmware. After some convincing, a version of the new firmware was finally acquired. This new firmware would not boot OpenBSD.

bPlan, who builds the boards and writes the Open Firmware, was contacted. While they responded to the initial inquiry, they never resolved the booting issue. In fact, all further emails to Genesi and bPlan over the next few weeks were ignored.

At that point the hardware was released, with no additional information, it was presumed that the new Pegasos II boards would not boot OpenBSD.

Finally, due to the inability to work with bPlan/Genesi and the fact they owed the developer over 3 months pay, it was announced that pegasos support would be dropped. The code was not removed until later because it was too close to OpenBSD 3.5 release and would disrupt that process.

Current status:

Pegasos support has been dropped and the code has been removed from the OpenBSD source tree.

Both Pegasos I and Pegasos II boards were supported. However, the Pegasos II gigabit networking interface was not supported, documentation was never made available.

The boards could be used with either VGA (AGP or PCI) graphics console, or with a serial console. The latter can be selected whether a VGA card is present or missing, with firmware settings.

Known Problems

• The parties involved with the building and sale of the Pegasos boards appear to not be financially sound enough or trustworthy enough to merit further development.