OpenBSD/solbourne

OpenBSD/solbourne is an experimental port of OpenBSD to the Solbourne ``IDT'' family of workstations, built upon the SPARC-compatible Panasonic KAP processor.

Table of contents

• History of the port
• Current status
• Supported hardware

History:

The KAP processor used in the IDT systems, albeit using an instruction set similar to the SPARC processors, uses a completely different MMU. Because of this, no free operating system considered running on these Solbourne machines more than a few minutes...

At some point, an S4000 was donated by Mike Nicewonger to Miod Vallat, who then had no excuse not to work on a port. After a few years of procrastination, real work on a port eventually started in march 2005, leading to an initial import in the OpenBSD tree exactly one month later. And work continues...

Current status:

Currently, only the S4000 system has been tested; but other systems should work, although the L2 cache in the S4000DX systems is not supported yet.

Right now, the system boots single-user, but userland has issues, which are being worked on.

Supported hardware:

Supported machines

• S3000 (untested)
• S4000
• S4000DX (untested) (but the L2 cache is not supported yet)

Supported devices

• Serial ports
  • ttya and ttyb on-board serial ports (zs)
• Ethernet adapters
  • on-board AMD Lance Ethernet (le)