IBM PS/2 P70

B

balanga

I just came across a video about how to repair an IBM PS/2 P70 which I bought many years ago, although I was unable to get it to boot up when I last tried several months ago. If I manage to get it fixed after watching this video, is the any chance I might get FreeBSD installed on it?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRU7U1i2hCU

It only has a 120MB disk, so obviously not, but what about FreeBSD v1.0.
 
I think the minimal CPU on 32 bit was set to 486 a while ago, and has been set to Pentium now. Which means you could install FreeBSD on it but you're going to have to build your own release with 386 enabled.

Starting with FreeBSD-13.0, the default CPUTYPE for the i386 architecture will change from 486 to 686.

This means that, by default, binaries produced will require a 686-class CPU, including but not limited to binaries provided by the FreeBSD Release Engineering team. FreeBSD 13.0 will continue to support older CPUs, however users needing this functionality will need to build their own releases for official support.
Click to expand...
www.freebsd.org

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE Release Notes

FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.
www.freebsd.org www.freebsd.org
 
The 386 is pretty old now. Another option... not freebsd, but at least something you might be able to run, is to get an early release of slackware from somewhere like
ftp.heanet.ie:/mirrors/ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware
- you can see releases going back to slackware 2.0, and even sls linux releases that predated slack. You might be able to get one of those old releases to work.

Another option to investigate if you want a unix o/s on it is coherent, which I think has been open sourced. I used to run coherent on a 486, from memory. Console only, of course, no X11, but unix nonetheless, and pretty small machine requirements. Or you might even be able to find xenix somewhere.
 
Those were VLB days. Slot extension to ISA bus. Diamond Stealth3000 with VLB.

MCA was bunk and slapped down. I never owned one but worked on them.
Complained alot about it too.
Nice keyboard on PS/2 and curly cord if I remember right.
 
Phishfry said:
Those were VLB days. Slot extension to PCI. Diamond Stealth3000 with VLB.

MCA was bunk and slapped down. I never owned one but worked on them.
Complained alot about it too.
Nice keyboard on PS/2 and curly cord if I remember right.
Click to expand...
Yes nice keyboard on the P70. Of course it's designed to run OS/2..
 
I found this article on coherent, it might be worth a look. He says it runs on a 386, I think there is a reasonable chance that would run on the P70. Coherent 4.0 (the 32-bit o/s) would be the one to try.

itsfoss.com

Getting Nostalgic With the Coherent Operating System

The 90s was a wonderful decade. Apart from great music, you also had interesting tech. Coherent was part of the 90s UNIX-like operating systems.
itsfoss.com itsfoss.com
 
i remember cheap vlb dram based cyrus logic video cards beating the crap out of earlier isa vram designs like s3 911 and 928 or something
at 1/3 the price
vlb ide controller mostly sucked
first decent ide controllores where piix
 
Description and some photos of the PS/2 P70.

From here:-

1699306823763.png
 
SirDice said:
I think the minimal CPU on 32 bit was set to 486 a while ago, and has been set to Pentium now. Which means you could install FreeBSD on it but you're going to have to build your own release with 386 enabled.


www.freebsd.org

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE Release Notes

FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.
www.freebsd.org www.freebsd.org
Click to expand...
Correct. 386 did not have an INVLPG (invalid page table entry) instruction, which would invalidate a single entry in the TLB. On 386 a number of instructions need to be executed to flip a bit in CR4 (control register 4) to completely flush the TLB, a quick operation with a lot of collateral damage to system performance. Except for NetBSD, I don't think any O/S, including Windows, does this anymore. 32-bit FreeBSD would not run on a 386 unless one added back the instructions to completely flush the TLB.

And of course, as others have said MCA among other incompatibilities.

You might want to try NetBSD. It's supposed to support everything.
 
Thinking over the various options discussed in this thread, I think I would start with netbsd/i386 for the first attempt, since it's a currently maintained and supported release. Whereas old code like an early slackware release or coherent is going to be completely unsupported.
 
cy@ said:
Correct. 386 did not have an INVLPG (invalid page table entry) instruction, which would invalidate a single entry in the TLB. On 386 a number of instructions need to be executed to flip a bit in CR4 (control register 4) to completely flush the TLB, a quick operation with a lot of collateral damage to system performance. Except for NetBSD, I don't think any O/S, including Windows, does this anymore. 32-bit FreeBSD would not run on a 386 unless one added back the instructions to completely flush the TLB.

And of course, as others have said MCA among other incompatibilities.

You might want to try NetBSD. It's supposed to support everything.
Click to expand...
Hmm, I wonder if that is why netbsd/i386 wiki says they need a cpu from 486 and upwards to run...
 
blackbird9 said:
Hmm, I wonder if that is why netbsd/i386 wiki says they need a cpu from 486 and upwards to run...
Click to expand...
Ahh. They must have made the same change to their kernel.

Don't bother to try Linux. Linux has not just removed 386 support but deorbited all 32-bit a long time ago.

I recall 386 was a thing in 1988 but quickly lost favour with developers in 1990 when the 486 was released. The Pentium was released a couple of years later. IIRC most O/S's use the 386 as if it were a 286. I know OS/2 did and OS/2 Warp added support for the 486. But by that time M$ had won the struggle with IBM, thanks to IBM for giving M$ the OS/2 source code. MS-DOS did come with a driver that used 386 "expanded" memory instead of the "extended" memory hack third party vendors used with their daughter cards.
 
there was win3.x 386 enhanced mode that could multitask dos boxes, qemm386, desqview
dos extenders like tnt and dos4gw
novell netware 3.x
 
covacat said:
there was win3.x 386 enhanced mode that could multitask dos boxes, qemm386, desqview
dos extenders like tnt and dos4gw
novell netware 3.x
Click to expand...
IIRC this was Win 3.1.

It's been a long time since I've seen those driver names.

A person might be able to try FreeDOS.

Those drivers didn't actually use virtual memory per se. The page tables were used in a 1:1 relationship to physical memory, so virtual memory in name only. There was no over commitment (paging to disk).
 
blackbird9 said:
Hmm, I wonder if that is why netbsd/i386 wiki says they need a cpu from 486 and upwards to run...
Click to expand...
My read was that PS2-i386-netbsd is a seperate port apart from netbsd-i386 which now needs i486.

Unlike our Wikis you don't get a date of last change or any details regarding age.

This looks like it is stinky old

2.88MB floppy drives were added to -current on 2002/12/04, and will appear in next release
Click to expand...
 
It sounds like it might be tricky to get something working. Perhaps using coherent which presumably is frozen in time from when it was released might actually work. Or perhaps as SirDice suggested, some version of freebsd might work if it is recompiled for a 386 target, remembering also the disc device driver change. Anyway we have given the o/p some ideas to try in this discussion!

Of course there might be one other option: pull out the old 386 motherboard, put in something like a modern mini pc intel mobo or even a raspberry pi(!), and sort out the monitor and keyboard connections. The P70 plasma monitor might even have a vga connection internally if you're very lucky. The case, keyboard and screen are all excellent, it would be a cool project to get a modern mobo in the case and run a modern o/s on it :)
 
I used Coherent back in the day. It was surprising how similar or better yet, much the same, it was to NCR AT&T SYSVR4, right down to the kernel config. But it didn't support TCP/IP and thus Linux 0.95 just clobbered it.

I think Coherent did run in protected mode though I can't remember if it was 286 protected mode or as 386. Could be worth a try. Unfortunately I lost my old Coherent floppies, probably in storage somewhere.

Minix 1.1 and 1.2 did run in real mode. I think Minix 1.5 added support for 386 and MCA. MInix hasn't seen any development since a couple of decades ago. It could be a good candidate. Minix didn't support X back then and neither did Coherent.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top