NetBSD/sandpoint

About NetBSD/sandpoint

NetBSD/sandpoint is a port of NetBSD to the Motorola Sandpoint reference platform.

The Sandpoint is a reference platform designed by Motorola to help people develop hardware and software around various PowerPC processors. The basic system is an ATX form-factor motherboard with standard PC devices (IDE, floppy, serial, parallel), 4 PCI slots, and a mezzanine slot to which several different processor modules may be attached.

The main focus of this port is now on MPC824x based consumer NAS (Network Attached Storage) systems, while the original evaluation boards are still supported.

NetBSD/sandpoint News

2012-04-24:   KuroBox/T4 and TS-TGL support

The KuroBox/T4 and the TeraStation Pro TS-TGL with their special miconV2 power management controller are now supported.

2012-01-14:   Another NAS family supported

Netronix NH-230/231 and compatible NAS systems (e.g. Allnet 6250/6260) are completely supported now.

2011-12-28:   New NAS supported

The Iomega StorCenter G2 is supported.

2011-11-12:   Altboot enhancements

Altboot V1.8 supports new IDE devices (VT6410, IT821x) and NAS hardware (Iomega). A critical bug was fixed and some new debugging features were included.

2011-04-05:   QNAP support

Although already mentioned as being supported in the past, some bits were missing, which had been fixed now: RTL 8110S driver in altboot for V200 boards, s390rtc(4) driver, full support for the QNAP's microcontroller, i.e. shutdown, reboot, buttons, LEDs.

2011-03-19:   New NAS supported

The D-Link DSM-G600 (Rev. B) is supported with all its devices. Note that the revision A is ARM-based and therefore not supported.

2011-03-13:   Altboot enhancements

Our bootloader got an interactive mode, may be loaded as an U-Boot Linux kernel image and can replace itself in memory. This allows altboot to run on even the most restricted firmwares. Support for more 824x-based NAS boards and a new network driver for ST1023/IP-1000A gigabit ethernet (as found in the DSM-G600).

2011-01-21:   New bootloader

The new bootloader is called altboot and can load the kernel via TFTP, NFS, or from the NetBSD root partition on a local disk.

2010-06-10:   Changed charter to focus on NAS products

The primary hardware platform is now consumer NAS systems, running on Freescale MPC8241 and MPC8245 CPUs. Initially the KuroBox/Linkstation and the Synology product family is known to work. QNAP TS and Iomega StorCenter support is prepared, but untested. Read also the official announcement on port-sandpoint .

Archive of NetBSD/sandpoint news items

Supported System Models