These machines can already run NetBSD and old versions of HPUX. There seem to be a lot of them around at the moment as they are replaced by newer hardware. There is a bit more information about the machines at the NetBSD site, but documentation from HP is thin on the ground.
What works?
1/10/98What needs doing?The kernel boots, mounts an NFS filesystem and runs user applications with no apparent problems. In theory machines with any amount of RAM should now work but I've only tested with 12MB and 16MB.
Generic support for DIO devices has been written and seems to be working fine.
Peter Maydell has a serial console going.
The Topcat framebuffer driver seems stable but only in monochrome at the moment. Scrolling is very slow.
The LANCE driver basically works but has some problems. At the moment the chip seems to need resetting before every transmitted packet.
The HIL keyboard driver seems to work well. HIL mice are currently somewhat unsupported.
Lots of stuff. There are still lots of drivers that need to be done. For the 340:Getting the codeSupport needs to be added for other machines in the 300 family.
- The internal "slow HPIB" interface uses a standard NI9914 chip by the looks of things. The linux-gpib package has a driver for 9914-based boards already; this might be able to be cleaned up and put in the kernel. (I don't have any HPIB peripherals so this isn't such a priority for me at the moment.)
- The driver for the Topcat framebuffer needs to be improved. Currently it doesn't know how to set up the palette which makes colour depths of more than 1bpp rather useless.
- Drivers for other framebuffers need to be written
- The LANCE driver needs some bugs fixing.
The NetBSD bootloader doesn't support the `bootinfo' system used by Linux/m68k, so a proper booter will be needed sooner or later. At the moment one has to use a terrible hack in the head.S code.
If you have the time and enthusiasm to work on any of these, or if you have any useful-looking hardware that you'd like to donate (disks would be particularly good) then please send me mail.
The majority of the HP9000/300 code is merged with the Linux/m68k kernel tree as of about 2.1.119.Some linksI've put together a pile of other stuff that might be helpful if you're trying to get Linux running on one of these machines. This page has the details.