OpenBSD aviion

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

• 100, 200, 300, 400, 3000, 4000 and 4300 series
  These are the machines initially targetted by this port. Their design is close to the well-known MVME188 design, with different on-board devices; at the moment, there is no support for the on-board SCSI controller in the boot blocks, although the on-board SCSI controller is supported by the kernel.
  The only models tested so far are models 410 and 4300, but all the models in this series should work.
  Multiprocessor systems are not supported.
  
• 4600 and 530 series
  These machines are slightly different from the above series, but not too much, and documentation is available.
  Both the on-board SCSI controller and the on-board network interface are supported, and these systems are able to boot from disk.
  Multiprocessor systems are supported.
  

Unsupported machines

• 5000 and 6000 series
  These machines may eventually run as well, but lack of on-board device support might be a showstopper. Some documentation is available, but there hasn't been any work towards supporting them yet.
• 6280 and 8000-8 series
  Documentation is available, but there hasn't been any work towards supporting them yet.
• 8500 and 9500 series, and other 88100-based models
  These systems won't likely be supported unless documentation for them is found.
• 88110-based models (500, 4500, 5500, 8500+ and 9500+ series)
  These systems won't likely be supported unless documentation for them is found.

Getting and installing OpenBSD/aviion:

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