FreeBSD on Xserve ?

[David Leimbach]

On Sep 12, 2004, at 12:38 PM, Igor Shmukler wrote:

>>> 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.
>

I understand :).  I am not able to confirm this information with  
anything technical as I haven't looked very hard or had the time to  
check into these issues.

> 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.

I agree.  It's just the fans would likely be an issue for many users  
who have G5 desktops.  An Xserve in a rack is probably allowed to be  
more noisy than other stuff.

And I hope that you are correct about the BAT registers :).

Dave
>
> Igor.