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Pegasos

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The present article is about the Pegasos computer platform. Pegasos may also refer to the horse Pegasus from Greek mythology.
Genesi Open Desktop Workstation, built around the Pegasos II

Pegasos is a MicroATX motherboard powered by a PowerPC G3/G4 microprocessor, featuring 3 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot, two Ethernet ports (10/100/1000 & 10/100), USB, DDR, AC97 sound, and FireWire. Like the PowerPC Apple Macintosh counterparts, it boots using an Open Firmware solution.

The Pegasos is sold by Genesi USA, Inc., and designed by their R&D branch bplan GmBH based in Frankfurt, Germany.

There are two versions of the system: The Pegasos I and the Pegasos II.

Pegasos I

The Pegasos I supports the IBM 750CXe CPU (G3), has 100 Mbit/s Ethernet onboard and uses PC133 SDRAM. It was discontinued after a hardware bug in the MAI Logic ArticiaS Northbridge was discovered. Later versions of the Pegasos I came with a hardware fix which was designated "April". Further improvements were made in an "April 2" design which solved further problems. It has been replaced by the Pegasos II.

Pegasos II

The Pegasos II uses a Marvell Discovery II northbridge, removing the need for the "April" chipset fix on the previous model, and additionally offers integrated Gigabit LAN and DDR support, and the ability to use the Freescale "G4" processor line.

The 750CXe (G3) CPU boards do not require a cooling fan - it has been marketed as "cool computing". The current G4 boards based around the Freescale MPC7447 ship with a small fan. Passive cooling solutions are possible and sold with the "Home Media and Communication System", which is based on Pegasos II G4.

Operating system support

The Pegasos supports the MorphOS operating system, which is broadly compatible with legacy Commodore Amiga applications which profess to be "OS friendly" (meaning they do not access native Amiga hardware directly), as well as a growing number of native applications.

Several Linux distributions including Debian GNU/Linux and Gentoo Linux are also available for the Pegasos. Support for the Pegasos as a platform device has been integrated into the Linux kernel mainline as of kernel version 2.6.13.

There is an effort to port NetBSD to the Pegasos. The current state is that a kernel from the ofppc port basically runs. Further work is required to make it usable. [1]

In 2002 Genesi hired Dale Rahn, an OpenBSD developer, to port OpenBSD to the hardware of the Pegasos II. This attempt ended poorly in 2004 after cashflow problems at Genesi and disagreements between Rahn and Genesi regarding the need to respect the NDA of a component supplier. Links to all available comments on this situation can be found at the Phoenix Developer Consortium OpenBSD Wrap-up page.

It is possible to run Mac OS X on the Pegasos using Mac-on-Linux, but doing so is reportedly in violation of Apple Computer's EULA. [2]

Genesi/Freescale is initial supporter of the OpenSolaris port to PowerPC and Pegasos II being used as the reference platform for development.

Other Details

The Pegasos is listed in IBM's Global Solutions Directory and as a Motorola MPC7447A Evaluation/Development System. Genesi was a Gold Sponsor at Motorola/Freescale Smart Networks Developer Forum 2004 and has since joined IBM's Power.org initiative with the goal to "OpenSource" the Pegasos II schematics on Jan 9th 2006. It is available as a member download from the Power.org website.

Other PowerPC hardwares

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