NetBSD/amiga

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About NetBSD/amiga

NetBSD/amiga is the port of NetBSD to the Amiga line of personal computers by Commodore and Amiga International and to the DraCo by MacroSystem GmbH.

Development activity on NetBSD/amiga continues at a speed dependent on people's spare time. Currently, NetBSD/amiga runs on any Amiga [1] that has a Motorola 68020 or better CPU with some form of MMU, and on 68060 DraCos. For 68020 and 68030 systems, a FPU is recommended but not required. 68LC040, 68040V and 68LC060 systems don't work correctly at the moment.

Due to the MMU requirement, it will not run on A500, A600, A1000, A1200, A2000, A4000/EC030, CDTV or CD32 out of the box. You must install a CPU board on them to run NetBSD.

The minimum RAM requirement is about 24 MB FASTMEM, the minimum hard disk space needed is about 250 MB, depending on how much system components you install. Check the install document for more details.

NetBSD/amiga News

2013-04-28:   Thylacine USB driver
Zorro attachment code for slhci(4) driver was added. Thylacine USB card is now supported. However, so far only keyboards and mice work reliably. To use them instead of standard Amiga keyboard and mouse wscons kernel is required.
2013-01-29:   Mediator 4000 now supported
Family of ELBOX Mediator 4000 PCI bridges is now supported by the new em4k(4) driver. It was tested successfully with SATALink 3114 and NE2000-compatible ethernet cards. Work on graphics cards support is in progress.
2013-01-28:   Software controlled power-off
The new empm(4) driver adds support for power management circuit on ELBOX Mediator 1200 TX and SX models. It allows powering off the Amiga from software if ATX PSU is used.
2012-11-26:   Support for swap on Zorro III RAM boards added
The new z3rambd(4) driver allows using Zorro III RAM boards (like ZorRAM and BigRamPlus) as swap space. If the kernel is built without this driver, it is also possible to use these boards as normal RAM memory in some configurations (which was the usual behaviour). However, it might have performance consequences, it is advised to use Zorro III RAM as swap space where possible.
2012-11-19:   X-Surf IDE support added
The xsurf(4) driver was extended to support IDE controller present on Individual Computers X-Surf cards.
2012-11-14:   A2000-style RTC driver rewritten
The driver for A2000-style Real Time Clock modules (popular also on A1200 CPU cards) had bit-rotted so far as to be useless. It was rewritten as machine-independent msm6242b(4) driver, with amiga-specific frontend under old a2kbbc(4) name.
2012-10-30:   Hydra AmigaNet / ASDG LAN Rover driver rewritten
The ed(4) driver, supporting Hydra AmigaNet and ASDG LAN Rover cards was rewritten by Frank Wille. The new incarnation solved compatibility problems of old ed(4) driver (especially with 68040 and 68060).
2012-07-11:   G-REX PCI driver updated
The G-REX bridge driver was updated and now supports all available PCI slots. Functionality of G-REX is now on a par with Mediator 1200 in the NetBSD.
2012-06-07:   Support for Mediator PCI 1200
Support for ELBOX Mediator PCI 1200 has been added. The empb(4) driver is still in development, but already does support numerous PCI cards (like NE2000-compatible network cards, SATALink 3112 controllers and 3Dfx Voodoo 3).
2012-05-15:   Updated X-Surf driver
The new, reworked xsurf(4) driver features support for two clockports present on X-Surf card (in addition to already supported NE2000 ethernet).
2012-04-17:   Clockport support
The NetBSD finally includes support for clockport-based expansions, thanks to the new clockport(4) layer and a1k2cp(4) backend driver. Also, as a proof of concept, SilverSurfer clockport-based serial port card is now supported by the MI com(4) driver.
2012-01-19:   G-REX busboards support
The p5pb(4) driver now includes experimental support for DCE Computer G-REX 1200 and G-REX 4000 PCI bridges.
2011-10-28:   FastATA 1200 driver
FastATA 1200 Mk-III/Mk-IV EIDE controllers from ELBOX Computer are now supported by the new efa(4) driver.
2011-09-17:   Prometheus PCI driver
The Prometheus PCI bridge is now supported by mppb(4) driver. It is theoretically possible to use all non-DMA cards supported by MI PCI drivers.
2011-08-04:   PCI bus support
Basic support for PCI bus was commited in -current, along with the driver for Phase5 PCI bridge, present on CyberVision PPC and BlizzardVision PPC cards.
2011-01-14:   BlizzardPPC SCSI driver
Radoslaw Kujawa submitted a driver for the 53c710 based host adapter found on BlizzardPPC 603e+ boards.
2007-08-20:   Driver for Buddha and Catweasel/Z2
The Buddha and Catweasel/Z2 IDE controllers from Individual Computers are supported by wdc(4).
2003-11-12:   Wscons PAL support
Jukka Andberg has added screen types suitable for PAL display to amidisplaycc(4), enabling PAL support for wscons.

Archive of NetBSD/amiga news items

Supported hardware

  • IDE controllers:

    • A4000/A1200 builtin
    • Buddha, Catweasel/Z2
    • ELBOX FastATA 1200 (Mk-III, Mk-IV) (6.0)
    • Individual Computers X-Surf IDE controller (current)

  • SCSI host adapters:

    • 33c93 based boards: A2091, A3000 builtin, A3000 builtin modified for Apollo accellerator, GVP series II
    • 53c80 based boards: Hacker, 12 Gauge, IVS, Wordsync/Bytesync, Emplant [2]
    • 53c710 based boards: A4000T, A4091, BlizzardPPC 603e+ (6.0), Magnum, Warp Engine, Zeus, DraCo builtin SCSI
    • FAS216 based SCSI boards: FastLane Z3, Blizzard I and II, Blizzard IV, Blizzard 2060, CyberSCSI Mk I and II
    • Cyberstorm Mk III / Cyberstorm PPC

  • PCI bridges:

    • ELBOX Mediator PCI (current): Mediator PCI 1200, Mediator PCI 1200 LT2, Mediator PCI 1200 LT4, Mediator PCI 1200 SX, Mediator PCI 1200 TX, Mediator PCI 4000D, Mediator PCI 3000D, Mediator 4000Di, Mediator 3/4000T
    • Phase5 PCI bridge: CyberVision PPC (6.0), BlizzardVision PPC (6.0), G-REX 1200 (current), G-REX 4000 (current),
    • Prometheus PCI bridge (6.0)

  • Clockports:

    • Amiga 1200 on-board clockport (current)
    • Generic Zorro-based clockport (currently X-Surf only) (current)

  • Video controllers:

    • 3Dfx Voodoo 3, 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee (current) [3]
    • A2410[5]
    • Cirrus CL GD 54xx based boards: GVP Spectrum, Picasso II, II+ and IV, Piccolo, Piccolo SD64
    • CyberVision 64
    • CyberVision 64/3D
    • CyberVision PPC, BlizzardVision PPC (6.0) [4]
    • ECS, AGA and A2024 built in on various Amigas
    • Retina Z2 [5], Retina Z3, Altais
    • Tseng ET4000 based boards: Domino and Domino16M proto, oMniBus, Merlin

  • Audio I/O:

    • Amiga builtin (8bit and 14bit modes)
    • Melody Mpeg-audio layer 2 board [6]
    • Repulse audio board
    • Toccata audio board

  • Ethernet controllers:

    • A2065, Hydra, ASDG LanRover, A4066, Ariadne, Quicknet Ethernet
    • AriadneII Ethernet
    • Individual Computers X-Surf / X-Surf 2 / X-Surf 3CC
    • Some PCMCIA cards in the A1200 (tested with a few network cards only) [7]
    • NE2000-compatible PCI cards [8] (6.0)

  • ARCnet controllers:

    • A2060 ARCnet

  • Tape drives:

    • Most SCSI tape drives, including Archive Viper, Cipher SCSI-2 ST150

  • Scanners: With the machine independent PINT interface integrated, these should work:

    • SCSI-2 scanners behaving as SCSI-2 scanner devices
    • HP Scanjet II [9]
    • Mustek SCSI scanner[9]

  • CD-ROM drives:

    • Most SCSI CD-ROM drives

  • Serial ports on these boards:

    • Amiga builtin
    • DraCo builtin, including serial mouse port
    • A2232 (normal and turbo modes)
    • MultiFaceCard II and III
    • HyperCom Z3 (serial only), HyperCom 4, 3+ and 4+ (not the A1200 clockport models!)
    • Individual Computers SilverSurfer (current)

  • Parallel printer ports on these boards:

    • Amiga builtin
    • DraCo builtin
    • HyperCom 3+ and 4+
  • Amiga floppy drives with Amiga (880kB/1760kB) and IBM (720kB/1440 kB) block encoding.
  • Amiga mouse.
  • Real-time clocks: A2000, A3000, A4000 builtin; DraCo builtin (r/o); A2000-RTC-clone on some A1200 accelerator boards.

NetBSD/amiga Information

Mailing Lists

Current Releases

Future Releases

Related Links

[1] There has been a report that the GVP '030/50MHz accelerator only works when all memory banks are switched to “Extended” (J12?).

[2] The Emplant SCSI adapter has been reported by a party to hang after doing part of the installation without problems.

[3] 3Dfx Voodoo 3 and Banshee cards are only supported with wscons and only if installed in a compatible PCI bridge. Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 boards might work but are untested. X server is not supported on Voodoo yet. Currently Voodoo needs initialization in AmigaOS before starting the NetBSD (unless used with G-REX, which does this on a firmware level).

[4] CVPPC/BVPPC cards are only supported with wscons and only with unaccelearted genfb driver. X server is not supported on these cards yet.

[5] No X server for Retina Z2 and A2410, currently.

[6] The DraCo Zorro-2 bus does not recognize a couple of boards (known: Melody Z2, ITH ISDN Master II). Worse: boards in ConfigIn/ConfigOut order behind them won't be found, either. This is not a NetBSD problem, but a design problem in the board (yes, right).

[7] Due to bugs in amiga-specific PCMCIA code only NE2000-compatible cards are expected to work.

[8] PCI network cards are supported only when installed in a compatible PCI bridge.

[9] There are reports that the Mustek and HP Scanjet scanners hang if accessed from the A3000. This might apply to other 33C93-adapters, too.