Re: [N8VEM-S100:1808] S-100 68K CPU board V3

[David Brownlee <a...@absd.org>]

On Tuesday, 13 August 2013 20:09:14 UTC+1, yoda  wrote:

> Not sure it makes sense on an S-100 board as the address space is limited to 16 MB.  It will probably be an SBC with a couple hundred MB of memory - when we start getting in the GB range it is not quite as practical and the old chips are limited to 4GB anyway without a lot of additional memory decode tricks.  I can probably get old version of NetBSD flavor running on even a 68K with some tricks - at least I will be able to gauge the complexity.

16MB should be quite usable for even a recent NetBSD. I wouldn't recommend compiling using a recent *gcc* in that amount of RAM, but otherwise the system should be fine [*]. 4MB would boot but probably not run anything useful in a timely fashion :). Certainly it runs on a variety of m68k machines where 16MB was a common capacity (mac68k, sun3, etc). 

I suspect the code for the motorola VME SBC could be a reasonable place to start ( phttp://www.netbsd.org/ports/mvme68k/ )

[I've run X under NetBSD on a Dreamcast in 16MB with root & swap over NFS, but that was more proving a point :]