NetBSD/pc532  

o About NetBSD/pc532  o

The pc532 port originally started as a direct port of 386BSD-0.1. With some freely copyable sources taken from the project to port Mach to the pc532, a diskless version of 532BSD started working. Along the way it became obvious that more people working on the same project would be advantageous and the project was merged with the NetBSD project around the time of the 0.9 formal release for the i386. NetBSD/pc532 became self hosting around March 1994. NetBSD 1.0 was the first official release for the PC532 computer. The pc532 port was removed on 2008-01-07.

Phil Nelson is the maintainer of NetBSD/pc532. There is a list of NetBSD/pc532 changes to 1.5.


o NetBSD/pc532 News  o

2008-01-10: Port pc532 retired
It was decided that port pc532 will not be maintained any longer, due to a lack of running hardware and developer interest, and that the CPU is no longer supported in gcc, as of version 4. Port specific files were removed from the head of CVS, and tagged with 'pc532-eol-2008'.

2004-12-09: NetBSD 2.0 released
NetBSD 2.0 released with support for 48 architectures. More information is available in the 2.0 release announcement.

2002-07-22: NetBSD 1.5.3 released
NetBSD 1.5.3 released with support for 20 architectures. More information is available in the 1.5.3 release announcement.

2001-09-13: NetBSD 1.5.2 released
NetBSD 1.5.2 released with support for 21 architectures. More information is available in the 1.5.2 release announcement.

2001-07-11: NetBSD 1.5.1 released
NetBSD 1.5.1 released with support for 21 architectures. More information is available in the 1.5.1 release announcement. (NetBSD/pc532 release binaries are not done yet. They will be available shortly)

2000-12-06: NetBSD 1.5 released
NetBSD 1.5 released with support for 20 architectures. More information is available in the 1.5 release announcement.

Archive of NetBSD/pc532 news items


o Supported Hardware  o

NetBSD/pc532 supports the ``autoboot'' ROM monitor of Nov 1991. It includes support to set up auto booting of NetBSD, including a secondary boot program that the autoboot monitor will load that in turn loads the NetBSD kernel from a NetBSD file system. Earlier ROM monitors can be used with NetBSD/pc532, but requires the user to find a way to boot the secondary boot program or the kernel.

Most of the pc532 specific development of NetBSD/pc532 was done on a machine with 8M of RAM. It should run with 4M, although it may be slower.

It supports a subset of the ``standard'' hardware to date:

  • 4 - 32M of RAM
  • 8 serial lines done by 4 scn2681 chips
  • NCR DP8490 SCSI chip (SCSI only)
    • Most SCSI disks work (both hard disks and floppies)
    • A few SCSI tapes work
    • A few SCSI CD-ROMs work
  • A parallel port replacement for one scn2681.

It currently does not support the AIC SCSI controller. It also does not support program control of the on board leds. Other SCSI devices may be supported even though they were not listed. If you want something supported that is not currently supported, you can contribute a driver!


NetBSD/pc532 Information

Mailing Lists

Current Release

Related Links


NetBSD Home Page
NetBSD Supported Architectures

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