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NetBSD Ported To SGI 02
NetBSD have added another platform to their supported hardware list. As the NetBSD/sgimips and announcement pages say, NetBSD/sgimips is now stable enough to run multi-user, making NetBSD the first OpenSource OS to run on the SGI O2. Currently it's known to work on the R5000 CPU, R10K and R12K are untested due to lack of hardware.
If you pay the money to buy a license for
IRIX 6.5 for it, then you get all the headers
you need to install gcc and in fact you even get
gcc precompiled for irix on the freeware cd.
Also, check ebay, people sometimes auction off complete IRIX cd sets for pretty cheap, you maybe be able to get a irix 6.5 set for $50 then you're sorted.
And yes irix 6.5 will run on any SGI with an R4000 or later cpu (except the R4000 Crimson or Indigo 1).
It's great to see an additional os run on sgi hardware, but at least for a while you likely won't see many switch over. Why?
Sgi does offer maintaince releases of irix for free on their site (several hundred megs, but at least they do offer it). Machines all the way back to R4k Indigo are still supported, so if you have the ram for Irix 6.5 you'll do well (at least 64MB, 96MB being much better on most hardware).
But mainly, sgi boxes are so fast because of their special hardware features! *Esp* boxes like the Indy and O2. The O2 R5k is a pretty slow box cpu-wise, but with crime graphics and ice it is **fast**. Take image manipulation for example: ont he main cpu you have probably pentium-similar performance. Recode your image manip tool to use OpenGL (and ice if you can) and you'll speed most everything up many times. ICE lets you resize, scale, re-color-code, color-space-convert, etc, etc all in *real time* on pretty large images. Its features like this that make sgi's so nice.
Now of course, netbsd once matured on sgimips may be more stable than irix (though they've done wonderfully with 6.5, my I2 easily goes hundreds of days before our house has a poweroutage, or it would go longer), and you have a current os as long as someone else (or yourself) is interested in keep the hardware current with the rest of the os. And then there's the ability to change your kernel and add your own changes, which you can't do with irix.
So...I'm happy (really happy) to see people taking interest in this port (and of course I'd love to see the Indigo^2 be supported too, right now I think linux boots on Indigo^2s (non-Impact?)), hopefully those who were so generous to work this far will also be interested in taking advantage of the machines, that'd be awesome to see!
Given the recent reliability *cough* of Slashdot, here's hoping they give one of those O2 + NetBSD boxes a try. :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Some of you might have heard about Andy's Software Wars Map where we could have a nice global vision of the software alliances around Microsoft's domination.
I guess if Andy's aware of this good new, then we'll have some others arrows on the map.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Saying the O2 is 32bit isn't really correct.
Since the R4000 came out mips cpus have been fully 64bit capable. How do you define if a machine is 64bit? If the bus size is 64bit? Ints are? Shorts? Longs? Pointers? It's hard to say "a machine" is 64bit.
Anyway, the O2 (using R5k) runs n32 (and older binaries), which are the same as n64 with only one exception: memory-addressing is 32bit rather than 64bit. The assumption is that since you have only 1gig of ram, needing to address more than 2gigs of memory isn't really a problem. It also means pointers and such use *half* the memory they would otherwise. The R4k Indigo2 is the same way, but if you use an R10k in it, you have 64bit pointers (I would have thought R10k and R12k O2s would do the same, but according to you they don't, oh well).
And the O2 does have some nice hardware, check out the docs to ICE on sgi's website sometime. The O2 was designed to do multiple streaming-videos on many objects, and to be an inexpensive sgi workstation. Thus, certain features have to be left out (if you need fast 3d, get an Indigo2 MaxImpact for less than the O2 costs, or an Octane if you need more memory bandwidth or faster cpus).
Hope that clears up any misconceptions!