NetBSD/acorn26

About NetBSD/acorn26

NetBSD/acorn26 is the port of NetBSD to ARMv2 and ARMv2a machines, primarily the Acorn Archimedes, A-series and R-series systems. These systems pre-date those supported by NetBSD/arm32 and use an earlier, incompatible version of the ARM architecture.

NetBSD/acorn26 News

2006-10-01:   acorn26 now uses standard ARM bus space implementation

Ben Harris committed a change to move over to using the standard ARM bus_space implementation on acorn26. This is more flexible than the old acorn26 bus_space, which means that single read/write operations are slower, but multi and region operations have the potential to be faster, and particularly insane podules might be supportable.

2006-10-01:   new driver sec(4) for the Acorn SCSI Expansion Card

Ben Harris committed a new driver sec(4) for the Acorn SCSI Expansion. Unlike asc(4), this driver uses the board's DMA system, uses the machine-independent WD33C93 driver, works on NetBSD/acorn26, and doesn't share a name with six other machine-dependent SCSI drivers. Not tested on acorn32, but it seems to work tolerably well on an A540.

2003-10-15:   arm port Xscale optimizations

Steve Woodford announced that he has committed various Xscale micro-optimizations to the NetBSD/arm ports. Please see his message to the port-arm Mailing List for details.

2001-12-08:   New -current snapshot available

A new -current snapshot based on 2001-12-07 sources is now available in the NetBSD/arm26 snapshot area of the ftp server. (snapshot deprecated. NetBSD 1.6 was released on 2002-09-14)

2001-09-12:   Minimal Econet support

NetBSD-current now includes minimal support for Econet interfaces. At the moment, there are no protocols implemented on top of Econet, so its usefulness is rather limited. This will change.

2001-07-28:   New bootloader

Ben Harris has committed a new bootloader, with support for gzipped kernels, to NetBSD/arm26. See Ben's announcement in the port-arm26 mail archive for more details.

2001-05-31:   boot with local root

Ben Harris (bjh21@NetBSD.org) has gotten support for booting with root on a local disk.

2001-05-28:   DMA in HCCS SCSI driver

Ben Harris (bjh21@NetBSD.org) has committed support for the pseudo-DMA facilities of the HCCS SCSI podule. This gets speed up to 300 KB/s.

Archive of NetBSD/acorn26 news items

Supported System Models

Note that NetBSD/acorn26 requires at least 8 Mb of RAM. Systems with less memory than this will not currently work.

Supported Peripherals

On new machines: