FYI: rudimentary loader for ppcbug-based systems

[Andrew Gallatin]

Peter Grehan writes:
 > > The differences in the alpha platforms are mainly variations on how
 > > the PCI bus is accessed and are more akin to the differences on the
 > > x86 between using ACPI and pcibios to access the pci bus.  The low
 > > level code such as what NetBSD would put in machdep.c and locore.s is
 > > the same across all alphas.
 > 
 >  But there's still a startling array of different h/w and processor revs,

This is hidden by the palcode, which is a sort of hardware
abstraction layer.   If you don't have any devices to talk to, all
alphas look essentially identical to the OS.  

Its the device support (mainly the PCI bus(es)) where things get wonky.

 > which is why I think there is a reasonable chance of getting a GENERIC ppc

That would be great.  I'm not trying to discourage this,   I'm just
trying to correct what appear to be some misconceptions about the
alpha port, or perhaps are my misconceptions about ppc hardware.  
Will one pmap module work for all ppc platforms?  Does the TLB look
the same everywhere?

Drew