[HN Gopher] Linux 5.5 to Offer Mainline Support for SGI's Octane...
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Linux 5.5 to Offer Mainline Support for SGI's Octane MIPS
Workstations
Author : dcminter
Score : 39 points
Date : 2020-01-26 10:47 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's not quite like that, there's quite a bit of hardware
| support that has been dropped along the way. It's not enough
| for people to care about stuff, they have to care about it
| enough that they maintain that support in line with kernel
| devs' expectations. That's not always easy.
| sansnomme wrote:
| A counterexample would be that most other open source Unixes'
| "MVP-level" of hardware support meant that none of them gained
| much traction and market share. The real world does not run
| entirely on Thinkpads.
| newnewpdro wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This part seems pretty special:
|
| > the more architectures supported the more mature the
| abstractions become.
| kick wrote:
| You're acting as if a kernel can only have one aim.
|
| _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?_
|
| NetBSD falls under this, for example, but NetBSD also has
| _many_ other benefits than "Can run on your Burroughs P100."
|
| Linux has ~5k people a year contributing patches to the kernel;
| it can have _many_ aims, because "Linux leadership" doesn't
| mean "Linux dictatorship."
| stefan_ wrote:
| That makes it sound like Linux is just a big dump of code. In
| reality, if you want to add some sort of device support, it's
| expected that _your code_ will fit in with the rest of it, e.g.
| use device tree and all the other infrastructure, and use it
| correctly.
|
| Some subsystems have stricter guidelines yet, e.g. if you want
| to add support for graphics hardware to DRM, the graphics
| subsystem, there must be a corresponding, fully featured open
| source userland implementation for it.
| uncle_j wrote:
| 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.
| tonylemesmer wrote:
| I had two Octanes in the mid 00s. One of them got damaged by a
| water leak and the other I sold for PS5. The 21 inch Trinitron
| CRT I had with it sold for PS20!
| MisterTea wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Older x86 hardware is incredibly cheap and plentiful in my
| experience. Of course stuff goes up in price as it ages and
| gets rarer, but that's just expected.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| 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?
| jandrese wrote:
| 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?
| nikanj wrote:
| Nobody stepped up to deliver those? The most common answer in
| open source
| cjbprime wrote:
| How do you know those aren't already supported?
| dkackman11 wrote:
| I recall using these at university for heavy duty GIS raster
| processing. IRIX was my first *nix experience.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm really eager to know how long ago and what kind of GIS
| software you used.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| 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.
| lwhi wrote:
| I used these at university too. modelling and animating using
| Softimage 3D in 1998.
|
| Makes me feel very old!
| Tepix wrote:
| Is there a clever way of hooking SSDs to the SCSI ports of these
| old computers?
| jibanes wrote:
| Instead, you should netboot them, and run nfsroot; works with
| irix so I suspect it will work with linux; dhcpd will inform of
| the tftp location of the kernel and pass the right parameters,
| should be doable and faster, more reliable. Now what I wonder
| is if X11/Xorg supports any of these framebuffers.
| newnewpdro wrote:
| It's not like nfs has parity with a local posix-compliant
| filesystem. O_APPEND for example is inherently racy and
| emulated on nfs last I checked.
|
| But sure, if you're just tooling around, nfsroot is
| convenient.
| Zenst wrote:
| I've seen SCSI adapters of many types - SD card ones as well,
| don't have any direct product I could link, google pulled up
| many avenues - including this:
| https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/upgrades/sgi-%28silicon-graph...
| though didn't see SGI on list, so hard to rabbit hole that one
| without using live chat perhaps and may well be a legacy
| placeholder that time forgot.
|
| Though network booting and storage may well be an easier avenue
| and cheaper. If you already have a NAS, that may well be the
| easiest path.
| hapless wrote:
| The on-board NIC in an octane is 10/100, so network anything
| will be _painful_.
|
| It's possible to install gigE, but you will need a PCI-X
| shoebox and also a NIC with compatible firmware. Not super
| easy to find.
| rbranson wrote:
| How so? I've never seen a gigE port that didn't also
| support 10/100.
| MisterTea wrote:
| The Octane had a PCI card cage option so it's possible you
| could add a pci sata card.
| aperrien wrote:
| I'm planning to use a SCSI2SD adapter for my old IRIS stations:
|
| https://store.inertialcomputing.com/product-p/scsi2sd-v5-st3...
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(page generated 2020-01-26 23:00 UTC)