Subject: Linux/ARM - Old Arc status report

From: Dave Gilbert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 1997 16:37:36 +0100

Hi,
  I thought I'd just let people know the state of Linux on the old Arcs.

1) It does work - my A440/1 is sitting next to me grinding gently 2.0.30
  - its presently net booting off my PC over an Ether1. About an hour
ago it ran the installation program off floppy but since I don't have
the rest of the installlation sets here it couldn't do much more than
ask me for silly things like IP addresses and whether I had a colour
monitor.

2) Thre are a few things which need work:
   a) The floppy code needs cleaning up, and in particular at the moment
it can only do 720K floppies - a bit of a pain.
   b) The MFM drivers work but they are a bit slow.
   c) No work has been done on serial or parallel on the old machines.
   d) It probably doesn't work above 8MB of RAM (aka juicy R260)

3) I have written an Archimedes emulator which used to boot earlier
versions of ARM Linux and needs a little work to boot current versions;
when I get that sorted you can have it running in a window on another
Linux box.  Pointless but fun.

4) I haven't had much time to work on it lately - but since I'm now
working rather than doing a PhD I now have >MORE< time to do it
(although I've got to clean up my PhD ready for submission which will
eat some hack time).

If I'm really lucky a couple of R260's (=A540's) will be thrown in my
direction in the next couple of months - possibly I'll be able to put
one together with 12MB which will make things interesting.

Dave
-- 
---------------------------------------------------- Man can not live  -
 David Alan Gilbert - gro.gilbert @ treblig.org ---- by bread alone. He 
---------------------------------------------------- needs chocolate.  -

---

From: Philip Blundell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 00:48:34 +0100 (BST)

>    c) No work has been done on serial or parallel on the old machines.

Don't worry too much about parallel.  I'll do that as part of the 2.1
parallel-code rewrite and we can backport it if need be.

p.