
Linux 5.5 to Offer Mainline Support for SGI's Octane MIPS Workstations - dcminter
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.5-MIPS-SGI-Octane
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uncle_j
Been wanting one of these machines for years, but they are sooo pricey it is
insane. Mainline Linux support will be good, but I tbh I would be running IRIX
as intended.

~~~
MisterTea
That is an interesting problem. In the 00's they were cheap and plentiful.
Buying old SGI hardware to play with was pretty affordable. Now people want
thousands. Same with old x86 hardware.

~~~
idiot900
Why are these machines so expensive? Is there some legacy software that cannot
be ported?

~~~
laurentdc
Probably just retro collecting craze driving prices up.

e.g. 10 years ago people were dumping CRT monitors, now a decent Sony
Trinitron starts at 150-200 €

~~~
uncle_j
That is more true of old x86 hardware and older micro-computers (Amigas,
Ataris etc).

The SGI machines are difficult to get hold of in the UK to begin with plus
they are as other said short supply. There is one Octane in the country and it
is the machine only (even though the monitor and keyboard are pictured) and it
is going for about £800 on ebay.

If it was everything I would have said "that probably the best deal I am going
to get" and went for it.

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notaplumber
[https://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html](https://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html)

"The OpenBSD/sgi port was discontinued after the 6.5 release."

That said, it was a very mature port and ran on many models, in 64-bit mode.

The code remains in -current for now.. the last release, 6.5 is a complete
modern (was released in 2019) Unix operating system, which is more than can be
said for running IRIX or Linux on these machines. I'm not even _aware_ of any
binary distros of Linux for these. And good luck building your own kernel and
userland.

~~~
mrpippy
I missed that when it happened, too bad. OpenBSD's sgi hardware support is
much better than NetBSD's (although that

I guess the reason is that they used an Origin 350 for builds, but the disk
controller driver had a bug causing lockups and FS corruption which never got
fixed.

[https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
cvs&m=156941089510768&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
cvs&m=156941089510768&w=2)

I also remember Miod Vallat doing a lot of the work on sgi, but he left the
project a few years ago.

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macdice
The Indy was a really important machine in my journey and I occasionally think
I should pick one up for nostalgic use... but... meh, Irix is frozen (there is
no OpenIRIX soldiering on...) and if I ran say FreeBSD on it, it'd just be a
really slow machine that doesn't have enough RAM to build x, y or z. At least,
that's how I talk myself out of turning my house into a tech museum!

~~~
ddingus
Later IRIX .28 and above has an active community.

I feel the same. Indy amd O2 were amazing computers. I got rid of all my SGI
gear. Every so often I feel a pang of regret...

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etaioinshrdlu
It seems to be my understanding that Linux will allow supporting any hardware
or software API as long as at least a few people care about it. It doesn't
matter how old or impractical it is.

This is not a criticism, but I would like to deeply understand, what does
Linux leadership want it to be? An OS that just runs on anything for the sake
of it?

It already seems true that Linux aspires to be much more than what UNIX is. It
can be a dumping ground of sorts for your ideas and research projects. As long
as the code does something useful enough without corrupting the entire system,
it seems to be fair game. That is kind of freeing and it would stand to
benefit the project to be communicated more directly. These are my
observations.

~~~
newnewpdro
It's definitely not a dumping ground, try get a new feature merged into Linux
and see how easy it is.

The inclusive attitude is exceptional for drivers and new architecture
support. The kernel is intended to be portable, the more architectures
supported the more mature the abstractions become. So as long as there's
existing hardware capable of running the kernel for the new architecture, you
probably won't meet much resistance landing support, provided it's not a
disaster.

~~~
etaioinshrdlu
This part seems pretty special:

> the more architectures supported the more mature the abstractions become.

~~~
asveikau
It's become trendy to say that supporting more things means only new work and
a big waste of time. The "validating the abstraction" thing is overlooked.

The OpenBSD guys also used to write about this for why they support obsolete
hardware and compiling itself on said hardware. That it surfaces bugs.

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jandrese
Why just Octane? Indy, O2, and Indigos were way more common. Is it just that
there are no surviving X drivers for the other platforms?

~~~
ddingus
O2 has a specialized graphics sub-system. Copper?

Anyway, it is a shared memory system, and under IRIX, that was done
dynamically. The same chips were used in their NT visual workstations. Those
did not manage the graphics memory dynamically, but were capable in every
other way.

At the time, one could push 500mb plus images around like nothing. Was a big
deal.

SGI did Linux drivers, and the SGI / Microsoft Farenheit project got in the
way. Those never left SGI for legal reasons. Had that happened, perhaps Linux
for an O2 would make sense.

I am not sure that system has ever seen a low level document release.

~~~
sillywalk
I believe the O2's chipset was actually called CRM.

The 1st gen Visual Workstations had a different chipset called 'Cobalt', but
also had a Unified Memory Architecture.

~~~
ddingus
That is what I was remembering. The two shared the same graphics core.

Cobalt. I knew Copper was not quite right. That is Amiga.

Anyway, at the time, PC busses were slow, and one could get a fair amount of
RAM on either side of it and sort of do what that system did easy.

The plan was to get that graphics system into Linux proper, and legal got in
the way. All we ended up with was a frame buffer and no real docs for the
graphics chipset that I ever knew of.

Too bad. We may have seen some very differentiated PC innovation a bit
earlier. If one wanted to do things like real time sub pixel accurate
compositing, or mapping video onto dynamically changing surfaces, etc...
anything requiring either/or large image data, high throughput between gfx,
CPU and RAM, the performance was exemplary.

A lot of that was true on a few hundred Mhz O2 as well as the 1ghz Visual
Workstations.

I spent a fair amount of time using both. Pretty sweet for the time period.

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dkackman11
I recall using these at university for heavy duty GIS raster processing. IRIX
was my first *nix experience.

~~~
Waterluvian
I'm really eager to know how long ago and what kind of GIS software you used.

~~~
ecommerceguy
While ArcInfo was certainly supported on Irix I'd venture a guess and say
Erdas Imagine for "heavy lifting" raster. Remote Sensing was such a fun class.

~~~
Waterluvian
Agreed. Holy cow did I have fun in my remote sensing classes. I'll still
remember learning about false color composites from landsat ETM+ data. The
first time vegetation just popped out and I was hooked.

My guess is on Erdas Imagine too.

That or some more programmatic stuff like an OGR/GDAL pipeline.

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Tepix
Is there a clever way of hooking SSDs to the SCSI ports of these old
computers?

~~~
angry_octet
Already done: [https://www.redrocktech.com/products/scsi-
drives](https://www.redrocktech.com/products/scsi-drives)

There are also Fibre Channel adapters for these if you have the XIO-PCI card
cage. Can boot from it with some special magic IIRC, but a local SCSI drive is
fine for most things.

~~~
aperrien
How much are the adapters? I don't really see prices on that site.

~~~
angry_octet
Sorry the FC adapters are original SGI gear, you would have to hunt for it.

~~~
wazoox
Actually IRIX works with old Adaptec PCI FC cards, but to get it running you
need to recompile the kernel with some arcane, undocumented parameters. Back
then when I was a regular of comp.sys.sgi.* newsgroups, Alexis Cousein gave me
the trick and saved my day when my official SGI card died.

~~~
angry_octet
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time...

It might have actually been Adaptec PCI in an SGI XIO-PCI card cage, memory is
failing me. Definitely some dark magic required on Irix and on the FC switch
and storage target side.

~~~
wazoox
Yes, that's right. I had an XIO FC board in my O2000 that died, and I had
spare Adaptec FC PCI cards for PCs. I had previously noticed that the SGI PCI
FC cards for O2s or O200s were actually the same as the Adaptec, physically,
but with an SGI ROM.

So after my XIO FC board died, I added an Adaptec board to my O2K to get my
RAID array back online (the whole company was out of work because of that
failure).

However though the card appeared in "hinv", it didn't work... After I asked
for help on the newsgroups (the system was out of maintenance...) Alexis sent
me a private email with the necessary invocation of the kernel rebuild
command, and it worked like a charm from there.

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anentropic
SGI always had the coolest looking computers

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mixmastamyk
Definitely cool for geek points but can't be terribly power efficient. Wonder
how a NUC installed inside one of the drive bays would compare?

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Havoc
Pretty tame announcement overall.

Little ominous though how heavily it’s reliant on linus being available. I
hope the business continuity planning is up to spec

