Upcoming Mirari PPC motherboard

News articles eventually fall away, so I am starting this thread for Harald 'Geennaam' Kanning's announced Mirari PPC motherboard, as there should be lots to discuss. Some of this may not come from anybody but Geennaam himself, but links to offsite posts still count as answers. A few comments of my own:

1) How much memory does it address? I don't see that in the writeup.

2) My only grumble is a preference for more expansion:

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I wonder how hard it would be to support an NVMe to SATA adapter board like

https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-RIITOP- ... set-ASM1166/dp/B0D8BCWHPT

The description says it's Linux compatible. Many Amiga users still feel nostalgia for floppy drives, and that goes double for me with optical drives, so SATA (even PATA) is not out.

With an NVMe adapter and networking and sound on the motherboard, there may not be much need for extra cards, but do PCIe splitters often/sometimes work without firmware or drivers? Any such remaining cards might be satisfied with one lane each, and a PCIe 4x splitter like this

https://www.amfeltec.com/flexible-x4-pci-express-4way-splitter/

says that it functions right out of the box.

I believe the only OS4 SCSI driver is for PCI cards, so I lament that loss, but will survive.

3)

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The T1042 being based on the same e5500 core as the X5000, if this comment is similar to the topic that Kas1e and Hans recently discussed here

https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/ ... id=154050#forumpost154050

then that's not so impressive. As development proceeds I would be curious if anybody (maybe only Geennaam himself?) could venture a guess as to the nature of the X5000's DMA issues. Because A-Eon and Hyperion aren't talking.

4) In the short term, the Mirari board just might spur some X5000 development, like a UBoot update and lower prices. Competition is good. :)

5) I don't think Geennaam would have started this project without some plans to mass produce the boards. That is, I don't think he would have the resources to fund the manufacturing himself. Which (German?) company might partner with him?

6) Anyone want to guess what year it will go on sale?

@tao
I'm not sure this is the right forum to discuss this board but maybe I can guess some of the answers. I have no information about it at all, just read the news and looked at the SoC docs for curiosity so these are just my guesses and what I understood which may be wrong.

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I think the SoC is 64bit and can use up to 64GB RAM or so but it does not matter much for AmigaOS which can only use 2GB and the rest only as RAM disk maybe.

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I think the board was designed for T2081 as an option but only available so far with T1042 which has SATA but one of the two SATA or NVMe ports share the same connection so you always have 1 SATA 1 NVMe and a third port either SATA or NVMe if I got that correctly.

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Matter of drivers, should work under Linux and it's unclear if AmigaOS will be available on this board but then somebody would need to write a driver for such SATA card to make it work.

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Same as above, needs driver and also kernel support. I think this was addressed in the (yet unreleased) pegasos2 kernel so it may be possible to write bridge driver, question is if they are willing to port AmigaOS to this board. Things that are plug and play on Linux are not necessarily work on other OSes. They work on Linux as it has drivers for a lot of hardware.

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Considering that X5000 has the fastest PCIe for NG Amigas currently that's not bad if this board can do the same just be more affordable.

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What does Geennaam have to do with X5000? It's A-Eon's board so they have to find out.

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Why German? You can order PCBs from anywhere, assembling is more difficult and may cost more. AFAIU it isn't Geennaam's project but Skateman's primarily with Geennaam helping with design and development but he does not have to care about how it will be produced or what will happen afterwards.

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So far they said it's a hobby project in prototype phase but all the first prototypes worked which is great result so if no major problems found, the board itself could be made available soon but the question is more when and if AmigaOS would run on it (assuming you want to run AmigaOS on it that's why you brought it up on this forum). Technically it could be easy to port as it already runs on similar SoCs so that means it could be available even in 1-2 years but there may be political issues which is in the hands of the people who own and fight over parts of AmigaOS so it depends on them and not on the board designers and they could not yet even agree on who owns what so AmigaOS support is quite unclear at this point.

@tao

I truly hope this gets to market BUT at the rate we're getting updates on existing hardware for OS4.1 I can only imagine how long it will take for OS4.1 to run 'properly' on this new board