free Unix for FPU-less m68k (was woody on lc475)
Hello,
> > i have a lc475 (68LC040 rev. 2E23G) without fpu support, i want
> > install debian woody on but the installer stop at half of the
> > installation of the base system; sorry for my english, where i can get
> > a kernel with fpu emulation support? if somebody have a solution for
> > this problem please help me? thacks at all
>
> See the FAQ in the Documentation section of
> http://linux-mac68k.sourceforge.net/ . The kernel has working FPU
> support, but your CPU has a buggy FPU (Macintoshes have a lot, maybe
> Apple got the cheap from Motorola?). Details in the FAQ.
>
> You options are to replace with a non-buggy 68LC040, or a full 68040, or
> recompile everything with --msoft-float. The first option is OK, the
> second comes with a nice speed-increase, and the third is probably
> undoable if you don't have another quite speedy machine to do it on.
As far as I know, soft-float support is not a part of gcc yet. We're
working on that, though, and we have a modified toolchain running on
NetBSD which produces a working system which makes no FPU calls. While it
still is not perfect, it is a completely stable and usable system. Bruce
O'Neel <edoneel@sdf.lonestar.org> did most of the work of creating the
soft-float patches.
So if you're interested in a free Unix that works now, check out:
ftp://lilith.sixgirls.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.6.1/amiga-softfloat/
ftp://lilith.sixgirls.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.6.1/mac68k-softfloat/
These were built using the release source tree from late August. We will
have another binary release for NetBSD 1.6.2, which will come out soon.
Also, I have a fast m68060 building soft-float binary packages; about 2100
are already built and can be downloaded from:
ftp://lilith.sixgirls.org/pub/NetBSD/pub/NetBSD/packages/m68k/
NetBSD 2.0 will use gcc 3.3; when we do soft-float for 2.0, we expect to
then be able to get soft-float into gcc.
Please let me know if you try this - we'd like more feedback.
Thanks,
John Klos
Sixgirls Computing Labs
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