OpenBSD mvme68k

History:

This port was primarily done by Theo de Raadt in 1995 as a contract to Willowglen Singapore. An earlier port to the MVME147 by Chuck Cranor based on Paul Mackerras' old DA30 code (and using hardware donated by Jonathan Levine at Theo's request) provided a solid development platform.

Bizarrely, Dale Rahn, working for Motorola back then, also independently wrote a port to the MVME147. For most kernel parts, both their ports were analyzed but more code was written from scratch by Theo, or based on the hp300 code.

Dale helped significantly during the porting to the 68040 models and wrote most of the code specific to the MVME167 model. Later, Steve Murphree continued work and made the MVME177 work, as well as adding support for more VME devices.

Support for the less commonly encountered MVME165 and MVME141 models was introduced in OpenBSD 4.6.

Current status:

Currently, all the boards listed in the supported hardware section below boot multi-user, and support enough of the on-board devices to be generally usable.

As none of the mvme68k boards have graphics devices, and none of the Motorola VME frame buffers are currently supported, there are no X Window System servers available. However, a complete set of X clients and utilities is available, allowing OpenBSD/mvme68k machines to behave as X11 font servers, or run X clients on remote display.

Supported hardware:

Supported processor boards

• MVME141 (68030)
  Both VME and VSB memory boards are supported, such as MVME224 boards. All the on-board devices are supported, except for the VSB controller.
• MVME147 (68030)
  All the on-board devices are supported, except for the parallel port.
• MVME162 (68040)
  Almost all the on-board devices are supported, with the following exceptions:
  • VME bus support is untested
  • Parity and ECC error reporting is not supported (but memory works just fine!)
  • Flash driver not working
  • IP module driver untested
• MVME165 (68040)
  All the on-board devices are supported, except for the VSB controller.
• MVME167 (68040)
  All the on-board devices are supported, except for the parallel port.
• MVME172 (68060)
  Works as well as the MVME162.
• MVME177 (68060)
  Works as well as the MVME167.

Faithful clones of these boards, or other Motorola models may work as well (MVME166, for example).

Supported extension boards

• MVME327A SCSI and floppy Controller (vsbic), currently limited to the SCSI interface
• MVME328 High Performance SCSI Controller (vs)
• MVME376 Ethernet Communications Controller (le)

Getting and installing OpenBSD/mvme68k:

The last supported OpenBSD/mvme68k release was OpenBSD 5.5. Here are the OpenBSD/mvme68k 5.5 installation instructions.

Hardware details:

As VME hardware is quite uncommon in the average retail place, this section is here to satisfy the well-founded curiosity about the mvme68k hardware.

This picture is a MVME162 processor board, with the on-board ethernet and SCSI controller options, one IndustryPack module, and a memory extension.