NetBSD/hp300

About NetBSD/hp300

NetBSD/hp300 is the port of NetBSD to Hewlett-Packard 9000 Series 300 and 400 workstations. It runs on almost all workstations from this generation. Series 700 and 800 workstations are not currently supported, but work is underway on NetBSD/hp700.

NetBSD/hp300 is based on work done by David P. Davis at the University of California, Berkeley and the Systems Programming Group at the University of Utah Department of Computer Science, beginning in the mid-80's. It was imported into the NetBSD source tree on May 13, 1993. Special thanks are extended to David and the Systems Programming Group for their work. Without it, the port would not exist.

Easily installed binary distributions of NetBSD/hp300 are available for the 4.0 release and for snapshots of NetBSD-current.

NetBSD/hp300 News

2008-10-13:   NetBSD 4.0.1 released

NetBSD 4.0.1 has been released. More information is available in the 4.0.1 release announcement.

2007-12-19:   NetBSD 4.0 released

NetBSD 4.0 has been released. More information is available in the 4.0 release announcement.

2006-11-04:   NetBSD 3.1 released

NetBSD 3.1, the first maintenance release of the netbsd-3 release branch, has been released with binary distributions for 53 architectures. More information is available in the 3.1 release announcement.

2006-05-09:   binary packages for m68k available

About 1000 packages built from the latest branch pkgsrc-2006Q1 by Greg Oster are now available at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/packages-2006Q1/NetBSD-3.0/m68k. The packages can be used on all ports based on m68k.

For some more details, see Greg Oster's announcement

2006-01-28:   SYS_UBOOT bug fixed

SYS_UBOOT, which is a bootloader for NetBSD/hp300, had a silly bug since 2005-02-20, and it has been fixed in this January. Due to this bug, framebuffer console will be messed up right after bootloader is loaded, while serial console will work properly. SYS_UBOOT in NetBSD 3.0 also has this problem and the fix has been pulled up to both netbsd-3 and netbsd-3-0 branches. If you will try install NetBSD 3.0 release on you hp300 machines, please use SYS_UBOOT binary in NetBSD 2.1 release or one in daily snapshots of netbsd-3-0 or netbsd-3 branch for workaround.

2005-12-23:   NetBSD 3.0 released

NetBSD 3.0 released with support for 57 architectures. More information is available in the 3.0 release announcement.

2004-04-10:   APCI com fixed

Some fixes for apci serial, which switched to MI com(4) driver, are committed so that now it's actually functional.

2004-04-08:   Framebuffer attachment problem fixed

A longstanding bug in console attachment functions is fixed, so that now DIO based framebuffers (mostly used on HP4xx machines) can be used as console again.

Archive of NetBSD/hp300 news items

Supported system models

All systems with a FPU are supported in NetBSD/hp300 (this excludes the 310 and 332). Systems marked with a “*” do not support the built-in framebuffer. You will need to set up a serial console on these machines.

Some specific configurations of the above models don't support a local console. In particular, the 362 and 382 have a built-in framebuffer that is unsupported. The 425e (and some rare 4XXt and 4XXdl machines) have their graphics device on the SGC bus, which is currently unsupported. Also, to use local console on a Series 400 workstation, you must currently use a HP-HIL keyboard/mouse (instead of Domain keyboard/mouse).

Unsupported HP models

The following HP workstations are not and will never be supported under NetBSD/hp300 due to extremely different architectures:

Here are a few links that might be of interest to anyone with HP hardware not supported by NetBSD/hp300: