OpenBSD aviion


OpenBSD/aviion is a port of OpenBSD to the Motorola 88100- and 88110-based AViiON systems manufactured by Data General.

The OpenBSD/aviion port has been discontinued after the 5.7 release.


History:

In September 2003, Chris Tribo published some excerpts of the technical documentation for the AViiON series 400. From a cursory glance at it, it was obvious these systems were built upon a modified MVME188 design, which was already supported by OpenBSD/mvme88k, but there was no interest in AViiON support at that time.

Then, late April 2006, enough boredom convinced Miod Vallat to start a port, even though he did not have access to any AViiON hardware, as a challenge. In two weeks, thanks to the help of Chris Tribo, a model 410 was running multiuser (but diskless) - a proof that this effort was worth continuing inside the OpenBSD tree.

Work on the port has continued since then, adding support for the 4600/530 family, as well as multiprocessor support. The port was left staging until the effort to switch all m88k ports towards the ELF binary file format and shared library paid off, from autumn 2012 to winter 2013.

The port eventually became self-hosting on a dual-processor 4600 model in October 2013, with the first working (i.e. recognized by the PROM) boot blocks.


Current status:

All supported models (or with similar designs) should run multi-user, and are currently limited to serial console.


Supported hardware:

Supported machines

Unsupported machines


Getting and installing OpenBSD/aviion:

The last supported OpenBSD/aviion release was OpenBSD 5.7. Here are the OpenBSD/aviion 5.7 installation instructions.