i860, was : Re: modern stuff

[Christian Groessler]

On 10/27/18 15:04, emanuel stiebler via cctalk wrote:
> There was actually a nice PC Mainboard from Hauppauge, with an i486 &
> i860 on the same board ...
>
> Always wanted to have one of those, never found a used one. And it was
> running some king of Unix back then ...
>
> http://www.geekdot.com/hauppauge-4860/


I have a computer with this mainboard.

I received a DOS version of the Portland Group's C compiler for i860 
along with it. The DOS software also had a "run860"
program, to -- you guess it -- run programs on the i860.

I then wrote a Linux version of "run860" and created an assembler 
toolchain for Linux to target i860 (using GNU binutils).

I was able to compile and run the "blink" demo from the manual on Linux 
instead of DOS. And some other assembler
programs written by me.

These things can be found on ftp://ftp.groessler.org/pub/chris/i860 .

At this time I was in contact with the original author of the i860 
binutils support, Jason Eckhardt. With his help and
patch to gcc, I was able to compile newlib with gcc for i860. But I've 
never tested it beyond compilation.
Jason also told me that he had a modified Linux kernel for i860 (which 
IIRC was for a then already old version of Linux).
Since according to the motherboard manual, interrupts from hardware 
devices always interrupt the i486, and not the
i860, I never asked him for this version. Getting that to work, with 
i486 and i860 cooperation, didn't appeal to me.

regards,
chris