SGI: Development

This is something more out of idle curiosity. It seems originally it was only for Tru64 however someone rather recently ported it to Linux. The documentation to do so is available here .

Without sitting in front of a 64-bit machine myself (I only have the O2 up at the moment) it seems all you need is the VLM, curl (neko_curl?) and that's it however I have no idea if big-endianess will cause issues. OpenGenera would for me at least be a lot easier to handle than running it on some random Alpha box, moreso for someone who runs an SGI somewhere full-time but also wants a Symbolics machine running as a network device without all the hassle of trying to get an actual machine running reliably.

If it runs on Alpha then it should work as I know Alpha had big endian UNIX on it at some point.

Raion-Fox wrote: If it runs on Alpha then it should work as I know Alpha had big endian UNIX on it at some point.

I'm afraid you must be confusing with something else. Alpha is little endian, and can't change endianness at reset time (unlike mips).

DEC architectures were mostly all little-endian. The PDP-11 was strange because it was little-endian for 16-bit words, but stored doublewords as two words in big-endian order. That was DEC's first (IIRC) byte-addressed machine; the VAX and Alpha were consistently little-endian.
The Alpha VLM does make calls to Mach traps, but I don't know whether it uses them explicitly or whether they are just part of the C library. MIPS and Alpha are similar enough that a direct translation may be possible, modulo Mach issues. The Linux port obviously doesn't use Mach, but as far as I know the source is not on the Internet.