RouterBOARD RB600A support

[Mark Kettenis]

I recently finished the support for the MicroTik RouterBOARD RB600A by
giving OpenBSD/socppc a miniroot image that one can simply write to
Compact Flash and stick onto the board.  Detailed instructions have
been added to INSTALL.socppc.  All essential hardware on the board is
now supported (with lots of contributions from dms@).  While the board
has some limitations (no battery-powered clock, Compact Flash only
supports PIO) I quite like the board, and it has been serving as my
firewall at home for a couple of months now.

I'm interested in extended support for more SoC's in the Freescale
PowerQUICC II Pro range.  Especially the MPC8308 and MPC8377 look
interesting.  If anybody is interested and willing to donate a
development board or a hackable product based on these chips, please
contact me.

To guarantee the availability of releases and snapshots, Theo really
needs a machine.  Since the Thecus N1200 seems to be no longer
available, it would be nice (pretty much essential) we get him a RB600
board with indoor case and 110V power supply.  There is a list of
distributors on http://www.routerboard.com; best thing is probably to
order from the online shop of the Canadian distributor and have them
ship directly to Theo.

Thanks,

Mark

[Ivan Nudzik]

Great job, Mark. And what about RB1000 (from Mikrotik)? It is a
PowerQUICCb" III MPC8547E board. It's quite expensive, but performance is
at least interesting. Also could be plugged with more SODIMM RAM as
other RB can't.

I.

On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 22:36 +0100, Mark Kettenis wrote:

> I recently finished the support for the MicroTik RouterBOARD RB600A by
> giving OpenBSD/socppc a miniroot image that one can simply write to
> Compact Flash and stick onto the board.  Detailed instructions have
> been added to INSTALL.socppc.  All essential hardware on the board is
> now supported (with lots of contributions from dms@).  While the board
> has some limitations (no battery-powered clock, Compact Flash only
> supports PIO) I quite like the board, and it has been serving as my
> firewall at home for a couple of months now.
>
> I'm interested in extended support for more SoC's in the Freescale
> PowerQUICC II Pro range.  Especially the MPC8308 and MPC8377 look
> interesting.  If anybody is interested and willing to donate a
> development board or a hackable product based on these chips, please
> contact me.
>
> To guarantee the availability of releases and snapshots, Theo really
> needs a machine.  Since the Thecus N1200 seems to be no longer
> available, it would be nice (pretty much essential) we get him a RB600
> board with indoor case and 110V power supply.  There is a list of
> distributors on http://www.routerboard.com; best thing is probably to
> order from the online shop of the Canadian distributor and have them
> ship directly to Theo.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark

[Mark Kettenis]

> From: Ivan Nudzik <ivan.nudzik@...>
> Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:29:54 +0100
>
> Great job, Mark.

Dariusz did a lot of work too (perhaps even more than I).

> And what about RB1000 (from Mikrotik)? It is a PowerQUICC III
> MPC8547E board. It's quite expensive, but performance is at least
> interesting. Also could be plugged with more SODIMM RAM as other RB
> can't.

The MPC85xx series has a different CPU core, with a radically
different MMU and FPU.  The existing OpenBSD/powerpc userland probably
won't run on it.  And it looks like we'll need a newer version of GCC
to actually buid code for it.  I have a board though, so a port will
happen eventually ;).