RE: PowerBook 540c
Erik C.J. Laan wrote:
>Which takes us back to the start of the thread again, where Rick Genter
>asked (though on debian-68k only, so you might have missed that):
>".... I'd like to volunteer to help make the PowerBook 540c a
>first-class Linux citizen. My question: where would my efforts be best
>applied? 68LC040 support? Nativing booting? Somewhere else? "
>And I mailed that native booting was already being worked on
>(emile.sourceforge.net), so my suggestion was to work on LC040 support
>and SCSI-DMA for 53c9x-based Mac's because I think these progress in
>these areas will do the most to help Linux/Mac68k. As I already wrote I
>meant to suggest Pseudo-DMA, and you added some
>5380-based-still-PIO-mode models like the IIfx to the list, so I hope
>Rick is not to much overwhelmed by all this ;-).
Not at all.
>From the various e-mail threads, I think I understand
- what's lacking in LC040 support (supporting a page fault the fetch of a
floating point instruction that itself will generate an exception);
- what's lacking in native booting (look at the EMILE project);
- what's lacking in SCSI support (pseudo-DMA for 53c9x-based Macs).
Question for the lists: does it make sense to pursue a software floating
point solution as opposed to trapping floating point instructions? My guess
to the answer would be no, as I suspect that 99.9%+ of the code that runs in
Linux (both in the kernel and in userland) does not use floating point, but
if that's wrong, I'd be interested in hearing opposing viewpoints.
Rick
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