FreeBSD on Xserve?

[Igor Shmukler]

> > Why do you think that 970 does not have BAT registers?
> > There are 16 special purpose registers specifically to implement Block
> > Address Translation.
> >
>
> Because Peter already told us that they have no BAT registers:
>
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ppc/2004-February/000359.html

I don't know what Peter said, but I do have documentation in  front of me.
In 7.4 of Programming Environments Manual we have an overview of BAT including BAT array organization.

This comes as a shock to me. I am sending carbon copy to Peter Grehan, perhaps he could tell us where he got his information.

I am not trying to suggest that you and/or him are wrong, but I cannot find (in manual) anything that would support your position that 970 has no block address translation. Regarding 16MB superpages, I believe manual explicitly says that 970 has no superpages, but I did not go through the doc again. Therefore, I could be mistaken.

Regarding fans, it's not a big deal to support this kind of equipment. IMO, SMP support and other low-level stuff is order[s] of magnitude more complex.

Igor.