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Silicon Graphics Operating Systems BSD

NetBSD Ported To SGI 02 52

Posted by Nik from the NP:-In-the-car dept.
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.
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NetBSD Ported to SGI 02 More

NetBSD Ported to SGI 02

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  • Actually I got my Indy for 250 UKP, thats about 400 of your Earth dollars.

    100MHz no l2 cache though. So i got the 24-bit gfx card and the 200MHz 1Mb l2 cache upgrades for a further 200 odd quid.. making a total of approx 800 USD.

    Makes a superb workstation..
    --
  • The O2 wasn't designed to excel at 3d graphics, rather for streaming image manipulation (which is why the O2 uses Unified Memory Arch at 3.2GB/s). If you want great OpenGL speed, get an Indigo2 Impact or Octane I or E or Octane2 with vpro graphics.

    With regard to irix support/devel tapering off, have you seen sgi's roadmap? (http://www.sgi.com/developers/feature/2000/irix_m ips.html) How many other companies have posted their plans through 2006? Not many...
    SGI is going strong on irix, and will be for a long, long time. All that is changing is they are hiring *new* people to work on linux.

    Of course, you also have to keep in mind that the hardare in the O2 came out about four years ago, that's a pretty long time in hardware-time. PCs still don't have the memory bandwidth of the O2 I don't think.
  • I purchased my IndigoII about 3 years ago with 20" monitor for $1800, Indy's are currently going for $500, and my Indigo is ~$900 now.

    For prices, checkout

    www.reputable.com
    www.recurrent.com
    www.mce.com

    I'm still waiting to get a "good" port of SGI Hardhat Linux for it, but BSD is great in my eyes I'll see if I can spin it up on one of our 10k Origin boxes though....
  • Try running Maya on your Voodoo3...
  • You didn't say which version of IRIX is running, but SGI changed the development policy a few years back to make it possible to develop without the (back then) costly dev libs. All the necessary headers ship, so you can use gcc, etc to your hearts content.check out the developer section on the website. davemc
  • Actually, I received a 24bit R4k6 indy for free when they scrapped them at my CS-department. They're slow machines (with lots of coolness points, granted), so the best you can do is to ditch the machine, and use the monitor:

    Put a matrox card in your PC and use the monitor with Sync-on-green under X.

  • Actually, I said Indigo2 *Impact*, huge difference (at least 2-3x for 3d, 2-6x 2d, and ~infinite for texturing). Impact graphics came out in 1995 and are one *huge* leap over the previous generation. So, do the comparison again with an Impact with texture momory (High Impact, or MaxImpact (2x HighImpact)). Also, a semi-recent cpu (like a 200 or 250Mhz R4k with 2MB L2 cache, or a 175/195MHz R10k (2-6x 250MHz R4k)) will help out a lot. (the above configured box is faster at bzflag than a friends 600MHz p3 with a g400).

    After doing a comparison with a machine more like the above, also keep in mind quake[all versions] was designed with fairly basic pc 3d cards in mind, thus it doesn't try to do anything normally expensive (time wise), which on an Impact card may not even change the speed at all. As for the cost of an Indigo2, I recently purchased a 250MHz L2 cache I2 with MaxImpact graphics, 256MB ram, 4.5GB drive, dds-2 drive, cdrom, 20" monitor, and all the standard for less than $600. Not too bad. You could buy a pc with a faster cpu for less, but try to buy a pc with the same amount of ram and a 20" monitor, you'll be pressed to do so.

    Not to get into a "this box is better" war , but some sgi workstations are very well priced against pcs, you just have to look for the right ones, and know what you want (hint: if you want the fastest dnet scores, get a pc with 8mb of ram). Oh, and keep in mind that the Indigo2 did come out in 1993! And Indigo2 Impact in 1995. In 1993 the pentium pro was of course non-existant, in 1995 the pentium pro was just hitting production lines (just to give you something to compare it with).
  • When will you realize that SGIs weren't meant for playing quake? Stop using that as a benchmark.

  • If you want great OpenGL speed, get an Indigo2 Impact

    ?? My freind has a stacked out Indigo2 impact and my 550 AMD K6-2, 256meg, voodoo3 kicks it's ass in every aspect, Quake2, Blender...

    My Indigo 2 (teal, 100 MHZ 96 megs ram) gets beat by my 300 MHZ K6-2, 128 RAM, ATI rage graphics...

    The sad thing is that each Indigo2's cost 4 times what I paid for BOTH PCs combined. And this is with buying them used off ebay last year and buying the pc new from online vendors.

    My Indigo2 starts to rip and drop frames in the "bouncy ball 3d game" (from IndigoZone CD) when it is at 1/4 the screen size. It is un playable when it is in full screen. and lets not talk about Quake2 performance because it is just depressing.
  • MIPS-Linux have been running on Indys for quite some time IIRC.

  • Do you know if the Voodoo3 works with these monitors? Does it sync on green?

    Which Matrox cards work? all of em?

    Used you can pick up a 20inch Sony monitor made for the Indigo2 for about $250 USD, compare this to say a $400 21Inch PC monitor..
  • SGI is officially committed to Linux and seems to be the company that comes closest to doing "the right thing" by working WITH the Linux community instead of trying to roll it's own kernel.

    SGI has also sold off the vector part of Cray to Tera, hopefully that will be a better match than Cray-SGI was. And hopefully the new Cray company will create some more interesting hardware than the decidedly luke-warm SV1.
  • The R10K O2 used an ASIC known as "Juice" to interface the R10K to the memory system. Think of it as SGI's equivalent of Intel's MTH in every way. In short, an unmitigated disaster.

    Later R10K O2's used a better chip, and I understand had superior performance. The reason why the R10K was put in the O2 was to have another platform for the chip to increase production and reduce the burdened cost for the Octanes and Origins.

  • From what i can tell, you can get updates to only IRIX 6.5. Thats very cool, but at least at my school we have several indys with irix 5.3, and not any plans to upgrade them. Right now they make greate paper weights(well they are a little big, but) so if/when NetBSD finally comes out for them, you can bet it will be put on them. On a side not what else *can* you put on a indy2( mostly r5k and r4.4k)?

    /*
    *Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
    */
  • Order the IDF/IDL CD's from SGI (or download the headers). Problem Fixed. No money spent. GCC still sucks, though.
  • SGI sold all of Cray to Tera, I'm pretty sure. The only supercomputers SGI will retain is the Origin 2000, I think, which is of course just an extension of their high-end servers. As for new hardware, I seem to recall hearing something a while back about the Cray SV2, being developed jointly by SGI and the NSA. ;) All the better to tap our phone lines, I suppose. I would not be surprised at all if Tera assumed the development the the SV2 along with the existing products.
  • problem is that linux doesn't run on the O2 R6k that I have sitting around... this is great news for me...
  • SGI now stands for "Servers, Supercomputers, and Graphic Workstations that enable breakthrough Insights." How f*cking corny is that sh*t?

    And it's irrelevant what MCI stands for (I don't know anyway), as they don't even exist anymore. WorldCom is now MCI. In other words, MCI as a company doesn't exist, they're WorldCom. Try going to http://www.mci.com/ [mci.com] and see where you get forwarded to if you don't believe me.

  • Re:Run Linux instead - maybe not (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You really don't know NetBSD. NetBSD project takes time to make sure their ports are complete, and they are very specific about the hardware it runs on. Sure you can say Linux has been running on SGI hardware for a long time, but which SGI Machines? NetBSD project will tell you which SGI machines it runs on. This announcement is for a specific class of SGI machines. Just because linux will run on one SGI machine doesn't mean it will run on all SGI machines, even if the machines are based on the same processor. Look at the NetBSD website, they are specific about the ports. For example, Linux will run on Alpha, but which ones? NetBSD I believe supports more machines based on Alpha than linux, and will tell you which machine types are supported.
  • Just go to a website and read.

    see redhat's documentation on their Alpha port on the redhat's website or the linux/mips docs at www.linux.sgi.com

    Doh!
  • The title should read O2, as in the letter, not 02.

  • Any ever get NetBSD running on an Indigo 2 R4400(??) 100Mhz proc? Any good, or just stick with the insecure but tasty eye candy that is IRIX?

  • Who knows, this may happen. SGI is deprecating IRIX. Support kinda shows. They're not selling much hardware either. It seems like their Cray end is the only thing that's keeping them alive (there's one more company that's happy for the ban on nuclear testing). Hopefully SGI will keep helping with porting/developing open source projects. So far it hasn't been that great. There are some definate oversights from the Gnu camp on this too. Try this: 1. Write a simple program with a int main() call that just returns 0; 2. Compile it (using g++) and link in pthreads using -lpthread and debugging info 3. run gdb on the output... 4. Marvel at how you get a Signal ? Moral of the story: sure SGI should help other people, but other people should help SGI.
  • Yes you are. Oxygen is fairly old iron. It has lots of quircks though...
  • Wrong.
    NetBSD's been plain 64bit on the alpha port since
    it's first day, and will be so on other 64bit capable hardware as soon as working compilers
    are available.

    "O2" isn't a chip btw, but a machine's name. The SGI O2 uses some MIPS R5000 CPU.

    - Hubert

  • Try IRIX 6.5 (Score:3)

    by rogerbo ( 74443 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @05:30AM (#966497)
    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).

  • From the SGI port mailing list [netbsd.org]: "code for the Indy machines will be available soon."

    As the proud owner of a 150mhz r4400, i'm happy...

  • Irix is a code fork from BSD

    Nope. IRIX started from System V, thanks to (not that) Steve Bourne, who worked at SGI back in the old days. Story I heard is that he and someone else, probably Greg Chesson, walked into Jim's office one day and basically wouldn't leave until he agreed to use System V instead of BSD.

    The interesting thing about IRIX is that it was one of the first SysV based kernels to incorporate a lot of BSD-isms, such as sockets and mbufs.

  • Well the graphics quality used to be better. We bought a O2 for $14,000 ~2 years ago. Now a GeForce2 for $300 has about 4x the OpenGL performance when running on a PC. A Elsa Gloria XXL has about 4x better than the O2 and it supports all the features (quad buffering, stereo, etc). The hardware (O2) is just getting old and the development/support for them is tapering off under IRIX. Hopefully someone will keep it going though.
  • Heh, I don't have an SGI. But if I did, I'd be all over this :)
  • I have an SGI Indy that's basically collecting dust; it's not a speedy machine to begin with, and the numbskull that originally bought it didn't buy any of the development bits with it with the thiking that the software vendor supplying a canned server "...will supply everything..". Of course 3 months after we bought it the vendor didn't exist, and the box is worthless because you can't port stuff without at least a compiler and the last I checked (admittedly a while ago) you needed the SGI-supplied headers to even use GCC.

    I'd even be happy if I could use the monitor with a PC, but it looks like one of those fixed-freqency interfaces.

  • The O2s with R10ks and R12ks are stuck as 32-bit machines because of the way the memory system was designed, according to a friend of mine who used to work for SGI as a field service critter. Apparently the O2 was originally designed for the R5k, and somebody in marketing decided it was a good idea to shoehorn the R10k in there... R10k O2s were sometimes slower than R5k O2s at the same clock!

    I hadn't realized until I checked the SGI website today that an R12k-based O2 was ever made... I thought they'd been discontinued when the Intel-based VWs came out. The O2 kinda sucks as a 3D graphics machine, too; it was designed as a media editing workstation for audio and video, and the only hardware 3D support it has is Z-buffering...

    --Troy

  • Damn... (Score:2)

    by BJH ( 11355 )

    I keep hoping someone'll get a port to the Power series (which use, for example, the R3000 CPUs) going, but by the looks of this post [netbsd.org] to the NetBSD/sigmips mailing list, it ain't gonna happen...

  • Taking advantage of the O2 (Score:3)

    by Chris Frost ( 159 ) <chris@frostnet.net> on Friday June 30, 2000 @04:16AM (#966505) Homepage
    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!
  • Umm... SGI either has or is in the process of selling it's Cray unit to (I think it's called) Terra something or other. Terra's buying the hardware, IP, and name and resuming business as Cray. It's kind of wierd how the transaction worked, but the Cray name is too important to go away.
  • Wonder if this will boot it:
    cisco 12008/GRP (R5000) processor (revision 0x01) with 131072K bytes of memory.
    R5000 CPU at 200Mhz, Implementation 35, Rev 2.1, 512KB L2 Cache

    :)
  • Considering how the Indigo2 was released around 93-94, it's not doing TOO bad. Does your friend Indigo have 1 Meg or 4 Meg of texture RAM? 1 Meg will hurt on anything that overflows the texture RAM.

    Plus, the old R4k based machines just can't cut against more up to date x86 processors. I mean, come on, an R4000 (circa 1992?) against even a K6-2 (circa 1998?)
  • How'd you pull that off? As of this reading you've got a Score 3 Flamebait... Slashdot is weird today.
  • SGI is still an acronym. I forget what its stands for, but read /. circa the logo change. Also, IBM stands for International Business Machines and I'm pretty sure that MCI is an acronym too.

  • Re:May I suggest a potential customer? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was especially amused that slashdot went down like a cheap whore within an hour of the "MySQL goes GPL" story went up.

    Lets just hope that GPLing it will make MySQL suck less soon.
  • According to the press release at SGI [sgi.com] the O2 was only released four days ago... or am I mistaken on this one?

  • May I suggest a potential customer? (Score:3)

    by Zico ( 14255 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @12:38AM (#966513)

    Given the recent reliability *cough* of Slashdot, here's hoping they give one of those O2 + NetBSD boxes a try. :)

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • now, if only a 2nd ethernet interface did not cost as much as a box pc...

    i have a feeling netbsd will be a better development environment than irix, but i will miss the opengl.

  • To be added to Andy's TODO-list (Score:3)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Friday June 30, 2000 @02:43AM (#966515) Journal
    Some of you might have heard about Andy's Software Wars Map [atai.org] 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.
    --

  • Re:**** TROLL ALERT **** (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I do not need to be a troll.

    May'be you do not need to be a troll, but you definitely want to. You want the respect and reputation that all the trolls of Slashdot have.

    Of course you could not post anything near as intelligent and coherent like all the other trolls, so you started posting all this ASCII crap. When that failed, you started outing the trolls since you cannot be one yourself.

    This of course has failed too, as the only thing you achieved was to get the trolls to move to another sid. This makes it a lot less fun for us because from time to time we all enjoy going to inchfan and having a look at what the trolls are up to.

    And a hint: just because you're stupid and discovered the inchfan just now doesn't mean that it was hidden. All regular /. readers knew about it for ages. Some choose to ignore it, and others choose to visit it from time to time.

    To summarise: Get lost you fucking loser.
  • yep, you are (really this time). That's the Octane 2 you see on www.sgi.com. The O2 is SGI's more standard workstation while the Octane 2's are much more powerful, and have even better graphics capabilities.
  • No, Irix is a code fork from BSD. In fact, Irix was the first BSD derivative to receive POSIX certification.

    On a side note, SGI has been releasing Irix code under the GPL. However, this is all for show and to get cheap press. If they really wanted to play the open source game, they'd release their code under a BSD-friendly license as a sort of offering to their roots (so to speak;). Alas, business and the GPL fail us again.

  • SGI didn't help !! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I still remember when we asked SGI to give some hardware to help porting to BSD some years ago. Their answer was NO because all their resources were being used on the linux port.
    SGI is dying and they deserve it. They don't care about Opensource, they are only interested in the linux userbase but they don't a clue on how to make money out of it.
  • Does it run on SGI Indy's? You can pick those up for about 2 grand.
  • >The SGI O2 uses some MIPS R5000 CPU.

    Apart from the ones which use R10000 and R12000, which are both 64bit processors.
  • I'd actually have to disagree with you on the insecure Irix, in the past yes; but not in the past couple of years. If you checkout securityfocus.com and look at the vulnerability stats, Irix & NetBSD are at about the same level (Irix had fewer then NetBSD, Linux, Solaris, but more the OpenBSD last year).

    I'd say that if they can get X going on your IndigoII then go with NetBSD, Irix is great for big SMP & Numa boxes but having all of that additional support can make it drag for single CPU boxes.
  • 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!

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