NetBSD/acorn32

About NetBSD/acorn32

NetBSD/acorn32 is a port to ARM- and StrongARM-powered Acorn RiscPC compatible machines and is maintained by Reinoud Zandijk (<reinoud>). The first formal release of NetBSD/acorn32 is 1.6. In earlier releases of NetBSD, these machines are supported by NetBSD/arm32.

The port first saw light as RiscBSD in 1994 and was later transformed into NetBSD/arm32. In 2001, the arm32 port was split into separate ports for the various supported hardware types. NetBSD/acorn32 was one of these.

Easily installed binary distributions of NetBSD/acorn32 are available for the 2.0 release and for snapshots of NetBSD-current.

NetBSD/acorn32 News

2005-12-23:   NetBSD 3.0 released

NetBSD 3.0 has been released with support for 57 architectures. More information is available in the 3.0 release announcement.

2005-11-02:   NetBSD 2.1 released

NetBSD 2.1, the first maintenance release of the netbsd-2 release branch, has been released with binary distributions for 48 architectures. More information is available in the 2.1 release announcement.

2004-12-09:   NetBSD 2.0 released

NetBSD 2.0 released with support for 48 architectures. More information is available in the 2.0 release announcement.

2004-03-01:   NetBSD 1.6.2 released

NetBSD 1.6.2 released with support for 40 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6.2 release announcement.

2004-02-23:   NetBSD/acorn32's booter manpage submitted

Reinoud has finally added the manpage boot(8) for the bootloader. The current bootloader version is v3.10 in CVS.

2003-12-31:   Substantial rewrite of vidcaudio driver

Ben Harris has largely rewritten the vidcaudio driver, adding support for 16-bit audio on the ARM7500/ARM7500FE and generally making it work better.

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.

2003-01-05:   FAQ updated

The FAQ has been updated and been actualised. Added is the question how to boot an NC into NetBSD using the new boot32 bootloader.

2003-01-05:   Bootloader v3.01 has been released for testing

The acorn32 portmaster Reinoud Zandijk has released version 3.01 of the bootloader. This new bootloader is a complete rewrite and comes as a NetBSD compileable single RISC OS relocatable module and is capable of booting all supported machines including NC's. It's still in development but ought to work fine for all users. You can download the latest released version of the module boot32 and give it a try. Please report problems to the mailing list or to the portmaster.

2003-04-21:   NetBSD 1.6.1 released

NetBSD 1.6.1 released with support for 40 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6.1 release announcement.

2002-09-14:   NetBSD 1.6 released

NetBSD 1.6 released with support for 39 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6 release announcement.

Archive of NetBSD/acorn32 news items

Supported Computer Systems

These are systems made by various computer manufacturers for which support as a whole exists.

Earlier ARM-based Acorn machines are supported by NetBSD/acorn26.

People

Core processor support was written by Mark Brinicombe (most of it) and Neil Carson (some of libkern and pmap, floating point emulators and libraries).

Support for Acorn platforms was written by Mark Brinicombe (most of it) with help from Scott Stevens (various device drivers), Melvin Tang Richardson (VIDC console), Mike Pumford (EtherH driver) and Andrew McMurry (Acorn FileCore filing system).

Ongoing Work

We invite you to examine the summary of current NetBSD/acorn32 problem reports.