The Web Site to Remember National Semiconductor's Series 32000 Family

NetBSD

In the 1990's the Unix based NetBSD operating system was ported for the Series 32000 architecture. NetBSD is an open source based OS. The port for the Series 32000 is called PC532. All the data of the last supported version 1.5.3 can be found in the archive of netbsd.org at PC532 archive .

In 2009 I downloaded most of the software for my PC532E project. Luckily I found some support in the internet how to get a system up and running. Again luckily the most important help is located not far away from my hometown. The contact also gave some important information for my M32632 CPU project. For example how is the instruction cache updated in case of self-modifying code (used for dynamic libraries) ? This is an interesting question if the cache size is made bigger in the M32632.

At the end NetBSD version 1.5.3 is running stable on my PC532E. After two month of testing the M32632 with the same software I believed that the CPU was free of simple bugs. But this was a mistake - see Systems/Acorn. Today the PC632M is running stable like the PC532E.

The detailed install procedure for NetBSD 1.5.3 on a PC532 can be read here:

NetBSD 1.5.3 Installation (HTML)

NetBSD 4.99 for TRIPUTER V0.33

I got from Simon an image based on version 4.99 of NetBSD. The image is a small one, just using half a gigabyte of disk space. It contains no source code and therefore no changes are possible. The MD5 checksum of the image file is "09EF9CDE 67D0F448 C7ECBE5D D5CAF961". I have zipped it and the size is now 141.5 Mbyte. It is available here:

NetBSD_SB.zip

After downloading the zip file, it has to be unzipped. The resulting file of 512 Mbytes can be stored as an image on an SDHC card starting at block address 0. This is all what have to be done to use it on TRIPUTER V0.33 .

SDHC cards are big enough to store more than one image. The software of TRIPUTER can start different images located at 2 GByte boundaries. Please have a look at the User Manual of TRIPUTER for details.

NetBSD for TRIPUTER V1.2 and higher

Starting with TRIPUTER V1.2 a new image setup schema is choosen. Now the TITAN5 software supports FAT32 formatted SDHC cards. This makes file transfers much easier. Please read the user manual of TRIPUTER for further informations.

The NetBSD versions are available as separate files. The first one is the image of NetBSD 1.5.3. Its size is 1536 Mbytes and the md5 checksum is "b648f283 aa923ef6 4a9e0a0b 753f6459". I use 7-zip to compress it to 98 Mbytes.

NetBSD_153.7z

The next image is NetBSD 4.99. Its size is 511 Mbytes and the md5 checksum is "fdbc9485 cecabc66 a245b009 bab13693". The compressed size is 81 Mbytes.

NetBSD_499.7z

The user has to store the uncompressed file on an SDHC card. This card has to be inserted into the SD card slot on the PERI board. Now you have to read the user manual...

NetBSD 1.5.3 contains the source code to generate new versions of 1.5.3 . NetBSD 4.99 is a more modern operating system, but it does not contain its source code. If the source code becomes available, I will generate a new image.

If all went well and the first boot of NetBSD 1.5.3 was successful the "df" command shows the output like in Figure 1. Good luck!

Fig. 1. The file system of NetBSD 1.5.3 has plenty of free memory.

It may be useful to see what messages are given from NetBSD 1.5.3 during startup. Here is an old example log file of it: NetBSD Boot Logfile .

This chapter was last modified on 11 December 2022. Next chapter: Oberon