Greetings, I am new to OpenBSD, but I am maintaining a number of ports in Macports for PowerPC. I am interested in OpenBSD as a second system and possibly for development, and greatly appreciate that multiple ports are provided as pre-built for ppc here: this is not the case even in Macports.
There is one immediate issue however which makes usage of OpenBSD far less efficient than it could have been: lack of FireWire support. Could someone help with this? FreeBSD supports FireWire, and I think macOS drivers for FireWire are open-source, FWIW. Maybe those could be ported? (Unfortunately, hardware drivers are not something I am familiar with, so I cannot contribute specifically on this matter. I can contribute to ports though.) *Why bother about FireWire?* 1. This is the fastest interface on PowerPC Macs, and FW800 is actually pretty fast, it is comfortable to use, and can be used with RAID. 2. It has unique features unavailable with other interfaces: target mode, also booting on Macs with no support for USB booting. For example, I could have installed OpenBSD on a PowerBook with a broken CD-drive from a FireWire flashdrive or from another Mac’s DVD drive when that is booted into target mode; unfortunately, neither works on OpenBSD. I did find a workable way to install it eventually, but FW is more versatile and user-friendly. 3. There are multiple FW hardware, much of that is still in use: there are excellent RAID systems, portable HDDs, scanners, DACs, video equipment etc. While some of those will require device-specific drivers, most won’t. But they need a FW interface to work. Best regards, Sergey Fedorov Soochow University (Taiwan) https://github.com/barracuda156
