FreeBSD idea

[RW]

On Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:20:12 +1100
David Morton wrote:

> I'm very new to BSD, and had a career that left me mostly doing 
> commercial IT help desk in Windows, but am hoping to finally learn
> and do something of interest to me: get deep knowledge of one
> platform.
> 
> A local magazine, Silicon Chip; and one of it's writers have
> developed a little computer called the MaxiMite.  Details here: 
> http://geoffg.net/maximite.html  It's a PIC32 single chip computer
> that I use through USB emulation of a serial port.


Since you are new to BSD you might not be aware that the three main
versions of BSD, have different priorities. OpenBSD focuses on
security, NetBSD focuses on portability and  FreeBSD aims to be an
all-round OS with more emphasis on performance on mainstream hardware.
IIWY I'd be looking at NetBSD.

I suspect that this computer (and PIC32 in general) doesn't have a
proper memory management unit, and that that will make it difficult to
port most modern general-purpose OSes. I'd check to see if NetBSD has
been run on a PIC32 (rather than MIPS in general).