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Hello all,

One of my OS's goals is to be portable, and I'm pretty sure I'm rather ignorant about what, exactly, is architecture-specific and what's not. I've done my best to separate the architecture-dependent and -independent portions of my kernel thus far, but, again, some things are unclear when you've only dealt with x86 at the system level.

Therefore, I'm planning on porting my kernel soon, as a learning experience. However, I'd like the port to be functional on some hardware that both exists and might possibly be useful to me in the future, so I've been searching for a non-x86 PC/Workstation-style system that's still in production.

For PowerPC, there used to be the Macs and the Pegasos boards, but now the Macs have mutinied to the x86 army, and the Pegasos has been replaced by this Efika crap. The Efika could be worse, especially as an eval board, but with only one PCI slot and no RAM expandability, I don't see it being terribly useful for my purposes. I've found a few ARM workstations designed for use with RiscOS, but they tend to only be available in Europe (i.e. the Iyonix), so I doubt I'll be getting a hold on one of those any time soon. You can still get UltraSPARC systems from Sun, but my pocketbook isn't terribly prepared for that, and I'd prefer a RISC architecture, anyway.

So, by this point, I'm pretty lost. There's simulators available for most architectures, and I will be using them for development, but that doesn't help when I get to the point of testing on real hardware.

Anyway, my post boils down to this: Does anyone know of any usable systems that don't reek of the embedded market and don't use the x86 or x86-64 architectures?

Hi,

I was going to recommend MIPS as you can pick an old dev board up for pretty much nothing, however they do reek of embedded technologies.

Why not just grab an old PPC Macbook off Ebay?

Oh, and SPARC is probably about as RISC as you can get at the moment - I've got the SPARC V9 instruction reference manual in front of me and... yep that's definately RISC.

Well, MIPS does seem interesting. I don't mind the processor being associated with embedded systems, I'm just looking for things that have boards available with some expansion rather than SBC/SOC-style solutions.

The macbook idea isn't bad, but the closest thing I can think of to being a PowerPC-based PC currently in production is the PS3, which actually might be an interesting idea, so I will keep that in mind.

The Iyonix PC had rekindled my interest in finding an alternative architecture, but when I found out it was rather hard to obtain outside of Europe, I started skimming through articles/misc. information about various architectures to try and find something else. One of the sources I had looked at had mentioned SPARC as being CISC, so I had immediately discounted it. In retrospect, I should've researched further on that. Thank you for the correction. I think I'll look into that. The hardware's expensive IIRC, but I know there's decent simulators available for those systems, so that might be a good option.

I guess I'm not necessarily avoiding CISC, anyway, now that I think of it, just looking for something with a higher degree of instructional orthogonality than x86.

EDIT: Grew a brain and checked Sun's site. Sun Ultra 25s start at $2,895 and Ultra 45s start at $3,629. A bit steep for single-core single-processor systems, but, I guess, not too much to save up for some day if I end up liking the architecture enough to override my attachment to money.

You'll probably do better to get an old ultrasparc that companies throw out - a lot of them are moving off SPARC to x86 so there are quite a few around.

There's apparently a shop called "weirdstuff" in california somewhere that the devs here frequent when they go out there - contains a shedload of sparcs, x86s, etc etc for pretty cheap prices.

I'm developing for MIPS as well, as I got myself an old MIPSel box from work that they were finished with

Plus adding RISC architecture support to a currently x86 operating system is a great way to stretch and stress your abstractions!

James

Note, that all guest operating systems run inside a "Hypervisor" on the PS3, it prevents you from accessing several key components directly.

I wouldn't go within 5 meters of the thing..

As for a system to play with, consider a SPARC as JamesM mentioned, people sell them all the time on Ebay.

Or get a Sharp Zaurus PDA, it's a neat little device, ARM based... but not a evaluation board reeking of embedded.

I think they all, or most models, run a flavour of Linux initally.. but that can be replaced.

My OS project is designed to be light and fast. It will run great on older Powermacs if I had an PPC-port. Older Powermacs are very cheap (35 euro's for a second hand blue/white Powermac 350 MHz, 448 MB RAM) and are often nice machines. If my OS begins to grow seriously, I would make a PPC Port for the old Powermacs. But there's not so much documentation around about that architectures, as for the Intel x86.

I would go for a ARM and a GP2X along with GP2X Breakout Board, these should be available in most country's
http://gp2x.co.uk/gp2xbreakoutboard.html

http://www.weirdstuff.com

this is what was mentioned earlier

Buy an iPod and write your own code for it

@pcmattman: My OS can't be ported to the iPod without soldering, I need an MMU.

Thank you all for your replies.

Nokia N810 would be also very interesting device to work with. It has an ARM processor and if I remember correctly there are documents available, which describes at least how own version of the Linux kernel can be compiled to that device. Maybe based on that document it is possible to put own kernel for that device. However implementing for example charging can be quite challenging task ...