$NetBSD: README,v 1.4 2026/11/12 16:09:14 thorpej Exp $

This is a port of NetBSD to the FIC8234 VME processor board, made by the
swiss company CES (Geneve). These boards are (or have been) popular in
high energy physics data acquisition (think of CERN!). See
http://www.ces.ch/Products/CPUs/FIC8234/FIC8234.html
for some technical data (you will have to use the Way Back Machine).

The highlights:
- MC68040 processor at 25 MHz (optional dual-processor)
- 8 or 32 MByte RAM
- 2 serial ports on Z85c30
- 79c900 (ILACC) ethernet
- 53c710 SCSI

The port is quite rudimentary at the moment. The kernel is started out of
a running OS-9 system. SCSI support is not present yet, so it only works
diskless with NFS (or ramdisk - not tested) root.
It is good enough for multiuser, self-hosting etc. however.

To start it:
- make OS image by "objcopy --output-target=binary netbsd <imagename>"
- load image to physical address 0x20200000 (RAM start + 2M)
- jump to 0x20200000

The kernel will first relocate itself down into low RAM before bootstrapping
virtual memory.  Note that the kernel can determine where it's located on
its own, and must be loaded beyond where it will copy itself to (cannot
overlap), so if you need to load it beyond +2M, that's also fine!

Sadly, the person who ported NetBSD to the FIC8234, Matthias Drochner,
is no longer with us.  If you have a FIC8234 and are interesting in
helping to keep this this port of NetBSD going, please reach out to
Jason Thorpe (thorpej@NetBSD.org).