Hi Nikolas,
On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 02:23:44AM -0500, Nikolas Britton
wrote:> I'm looking for documentation that could possibly help me port FreeBSD
> to a new architecture. I'm mainly interested in how you guys did the
> xbox and amd64 ports. i.e. x86 instruction set.
I can answer the Xbox question for you... basically, what I did was get
a good understanding of how the xbox internals worked (i.e. what the
exact differences are between an ordinary PC and an Xbox).
Based on this understanding, I patched the Xbox boot loader (Cromwell)
so it could properly load FreeBSD ELF images. Once that was done, I
worked my way up from the first piece of code executed
(that is in i386/i386/locore.s). I crafted some assembly code which
could control the Xbox LED's, and I used this to determine where the
Xbox would crash...
Once I got the initial machine-dependant stuff out of the way, I created
a console driver so I could see what was going on (which I later on
totally rewrote); and worked my way up from here... Expect a lot of
painstaking debugging in the progress...
Good luck!
--
Rink P.W. Springer - http://rink.nu
"It is such a quiet thing, to fall. But yet a far more terrible thing,
to admit it." - Darth Traya