OpenBSD zaurus

OpenBSD/zaurus is an effort to make OpenBSD run on several PDAs of the Sharp Zaurus family. Initially targeted is the C3000/C3100/C3200 models which contain a 4GB CF hard drive internally. The OpenBSD/zaurus port was discontinued after the 6.0 release. A mailing list for ARM-based ports is available at arm@openbsd.org. To join the OpenBSD/arm mailing list, send a message body of "subscribe arm" to majordomo@openbsd.org. Please be sure to check our mailing list policy before subscribing.

History

Shortly after Sharp unveiled its first Zaurus machines, some OpenBSD developers started dreaming of running OpenBSD on it, to have the smallest possible ssh-capable machine!

After the OpenBSD/cats was completed in order to benefit from a good ARM development platform, work on the Zaurus hardware started in 2004. Since the Zaurus was a fully capable machine, we didn't cross compile. All builds of Zaurus were done on the Zaurus directly.

Eventually, the OpenBSD/armv7 port development broke arm userspace on zaurus. Since there were effectively no remaining users, it was removed instead of splitting the userlands.

Current status

Hardware support is mostly complete and quite stable. The Zaurus boots multiuser and X11 runs. Most PCMCIA/CF devices work (such as wireless/ethernet cards), as well as host USB, SD/MMC memory cards and the keyboard and touch screen are supported by X11. Audio playback is working, and the machine is of course able to suspend much like a regular laptop. Even the processor performance mode can be adjusted with apmd(8), just like on other platforms.

Supported hardware

For a complete system component and device driver listing for this architecture, see intro(4/zaurus).

• Zaurus SL-C3000 (Spitz) / SL-C3100 (Borzoi) / SL-C3200 (Terrier)
• Intel PXA27x ARM cpu at 416MHz.
• 64MB of ram.
• com(4) standard and infrared serial ports.
• lcd(4) display panel, supporting wscons(4) console which supports X Windows.
• zts(4) touch screen acting as wsmouse(4) mouse controller.
• zkbd(4) native keyboard.
• pxapcic(4) PCMCIA slot, supporting most CF-sized pcmcia(4) cards (or PCMCIA form-factor ones, via an adapter).
• wd(4) on-board microdrive.
• ohci(4) USB controller supporting most usb(4) devices, or acting as a cdcef(4) 'ethernet' slave.
• pxammc(4) MMC/SD/SDIO controller.
• apm(4) power management and suspend.
• zaudio(4) audio.

Devices that can be connected:

• zrc(4) remote control.
• Most USB devices, see usb(4) for a list.
• Most PCMCIA devices (in a CF formfactor, or via a CF-PCMCIA adapter), see pcmcia(4).

Getting and installing

The last supported OpenBSD/zaurus release was OpenBSD 6.0. Here are the OpenBSD/zaurus 6.0 installation instructions.