Hardware-Accelerated Graphics On SGI O2 Under NetBSD

Zadok_Allan writes "It's a bit late, but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly, this might interest a few. The gist of the story is this: NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, and the documentation available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation, which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver still has a few rough edges (all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect, and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."

Comments

no one left at SGI who understands old graphics hw

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no one left at SGI who understands how to get X11 to talk to this old hardware. Those people were layed off back during the dot.com bust in early 2000's when SGI shifted focus from Irix to WinNT. Since then Irix has been on absolute minimum life support until it was EOL'ed in 2006.

Therefor it is nearly impossible to get any programming or hardware documentation even if the current SGI wanted to co-operate. It's all been shredded long ago and the people who wrote it are gone, gone, gone!

Octane / Onyx

[Bert64]

I don't have an O2, but i have a couple of Octanes and an Onyx, both of which should run rings around an O2... Is there any way to get acceleration working on these, or is IRIX the best that's available?
I seem to remember IRIX having an xrender library available, possibly from sgifreeware or nekochan, or does it just do software rendering? IRIX used to make a very fast X terminal, but modern apps always seemed very sluggish on it and perhaps that's why..

Why run BSD on old SGI hardware?

[fluffy99]

This is an honest question. Aside from the hobbyist and novelty aspect, why would you want to run BSD on old SGI hardware?

The O2 was a low end SGI workstation that marginally outperformed the x86 platform when it was introduced. Unless you have a reason like hardware or system specific coding, why not move to BSD on a cheap x86 platform?

Yeah, I know about big endian versus little endian - had to rewrite a bunch of code when we dumped the Sun E3500s in favor of running Solaris x86.

Re:Why run BSD on old SGI hardware?

[TheRaven64]

Testing your code on two very different architectures is a good way of making sure that it doesn't make any invalid assumptions. Things like structure alignment and padding (e.g. glibc), endians (anyone who casts from int* to char* to truncate), and so on. For a long while, a good rule of thumb was to test on x86 BSD and SPARC64 SysV (typically Solaris), and if it worked then your code would run anywhere. With old SGI machines so cheap, they are a very easy way of getting hold of a machine that is very different from x86.

Also, they're pretty.

Re:What a waste of time

[ari_j]

Virginity is underrated. What's really bad is getting laid once and never again! Or, at least, so I've been told. ;)

How about GPU-based calculations?

[damn_registrars]

We've seen plenty about projects to use modern GPUs for heavy-duty calculations. These old SGI's were roughly 50% GPU by volume, energy, and cost. Has anyone found a way to use the SGI GPU for computations?

Sooo.....

[KnowledgeKeeper]

is information about hardware interfaces in NetBSD enough to reverse-engineer most of the O2 machine so it could run IRIX natively?

If so, it would be very cool to make a clone of old SGI workstations like O2, but with faster CPU, better OpenGL pipeline, more RAM, USB ports, solid state drives while still being able to run software like original IRIX, Maya, Photoshop, etc. Wouldn't be too bad for the design of the case to stay the same :)