SGI: Development

It's Official Now: Potential USB Drivers Developer For IRIX

GeneratriX avatar
GeneratriX
From Rosario / Santa Fe / República Argentina
Who joined Oct. 21, 2003, 2:07 a.m.
Wrote the following at Aug. 31, 2005, 10:51 a.m...
From: Funding Irix driver development


This are the great news:

Oren Manor from JUNGO wrote: Dear Diego,

I am sorry for the delay I was looking for some information on IRIX in
order to evaluate the work required.

In general, the stack controller drivers (UHCI\OHCI\EHCI), stack core
and
Mass Storage and HID class drivers can be licensed at $30,000. In
addition,
NRE development will required to integrate the stack into IRIX OS. This
will include the implementation of the Host Abstraction Layer and
integration of the Mass Storage Class Driver with the IRIX File
System.We
will need to review the work required in order to give a precise price
tag
but from my preliminary investigation I can estimate that we will
probably
require around 2 month of development.

Jungo's NRE fee is a constant $20,000 per month. As I do not see any
option
of re-selling the IRIX stack in the future Jungo will not be able to
subsidize the NRE development based on future revenues.

Please let me know if you have the resources to justify this
development.

Oren


...And the bad news are that we'll need at least U$D70,000.- :shock:
unixmuseum
From Los Angeles, CA
Who joined April 19, 2004, 4:25 p.m.
Wrote the following at Aug. 31, 2005, 11:14 a.m...
GeneratriX wrote: ...And the bad news are that we'll need at least U$D70,000.- :shock:

$70K for being able to plug a friggin USB device to an 8+ year old platform? AHAHAHAHAHAH!

You're telling me the kids who implemented USB support into Linux spent $30K to obtain the stack controller driver?????

You know what I can get for $700? A Sun workstation that will run twice as fast as a dual 400 Octane2, has 4 USB ports (USB 2.0, mind you) and two IEEE-1394 ports... Best of all, the list of common supported devices (both USB and firewire) is a mile long!

Thanks for your effort Diego, but no thanks...
GeneratriX avatar
GeneratriX
From Rosario / Santa Fe / República Argentina
Who joined Oct. 21, 2003, 2:07 a.m.
Wrote the following at Aug. 31, 2005, 12:12 p.m...
unixmuseum wrote: Thanks for your effort Diego, but no thanks...


This was not any effort; just a few eMails here and there for something on which I could be interested too, since I really like the IRIX platform. But... Oh well... Maybe they have visited the site, and with a quick equation they have calculated that for about 1176 members in the forum, we could need to put only a share of US$ 60.- each... but we know that these are not the real numbers...

...Well, I guess these guys are accustomed to make BIG JUICE from their developments... I was expecting something on the line of 10K US$... but not, what the hell... they want "only" 70K US$... :roll:
TeeTylerToe
Who joined Sept. 13, 2004, 11:56 p.m.
Wrote the following at Aug. 31, 2005, 2:27 p.m...
I'm kicking around the "hows" of a simple SCSI firewire driver. it'll take me a while, and stuff like byte endian ness are too complicated for me, but patience may pay off. maybe in a month or so I'll have code that'll be able to send a single SCSI command over firewire in IRIX.
GeneratriX avatar
GeneratriX
From Rosario / Santa Fe / República Argentina
Who joined Oct. 21, 2003, 2:07 a.m.
Wrote the following at Aug. 31, 2005, 2:36 p.m...
TeeTylerToe wrote: I'm kicking around the "hows" of a simple SCSI firewire driver. it'll take me a while, and stuff like byte endian ness are too complicated for me, but patience may pay off. maybe in a month or so I'll have code that'll be able to send a single SCSI command over firewire in IRIX.


These sounds very good 'TTT'! :D
... And I guess could cost us less than US$ 70,000! ;)
Intel-OUTSIDE avatar
Intel-OUTSIDE
From EU
Who joined Dec. 16, 2003, 6:45 a.m.
Wrote the following at Aug. 31, 2005, 3:19 p.m...
hmm - Jungo are the company that makes the windows usb drivers for duolabs programmers.
i am NOT impressed with there work!
TeeTylerToe
Who joined Sept. 13, 2004, 11:56 p.m.
Wrote the following at Aug. 31, 2005, 4:08 p.m...
GeneratriX wrote:
TeeTylerToe wrote: I'm kicking around the "hows" of a simple SCSI firewire driver. it'll take me a while, and stuff like byte endian ness are too complicated for me, but patience may pay off. maybe in a month or so I'll have code that'll be able to send a single SCSI command over firewire in IRIX.


These sounds very good 'TTT'! :D
... And I guess could cost us less than US$ 70,000! ;)

$69,999 =]
GeneratriX avatar
GeneratriX
From Rosario / Santa Fe / República Argentina
Who joined Oct. 21, 2003, 2:07 a.m.
Wrote the following at Aug. 31, 2005, 4:13 p.m...
TeeTylerToe wrote: $69,999 =]


...Are you running again at loss? :roll: Damn! ...Don't hold your emotions to ask some money for your work 'TTT'! ;)
gandalf
From Italy
Who joined Aug. 25, 2004, 1:08 a.m.
Wrote the following at Sept. 2, 2005, 12:50 a.m...
indeed, this is a lot of money. I too would have estimated the cost between 10K and 20K, a number that could have been put together.

70K could be reached only with sponsors: bugging some institution, compoany or SGI itself and make them interested in the effort.
Dubhthach avatar
Dubhthach
From Bláth Cliath, Éire
Who joined Oct. 7, 2003, 8:16 a.m.
Wrote the following at Sept. 2, 2005, 1:55 a.m...
I wonder if the Solaris USB/Firewire stacks have been released under CDDL as part of opensolaris let. From what i recall reading about the license it allows the mixing of CDDL source with closed source (as long as any changes to CDDL files are kept under CDDL license). Solaris interfaces might be a closer match to IRIX then say those if ye were to try and port a stack from various *BSD's.

Then again i might be talking out of my arse... :)


--edit--

Here's what i found on the opensolaris site from a basic search:

http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/uts/common/io/usb/
http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/uts/common/io/1394/
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better"
TeeTylerToe
Who joined Sept. 13, 2004, 11:56 p.m.
Wrote the following at Sept. 2, 2005, 2:57 a.m...
irix's an odd one. I've been looking into it, and there are parts that could be taken from other places to speed up developement... I think. mostly it's the PCI stuff. it's fairly standard, except the details about how the program gets the location of the PCI config space, and the base address register, which I haven't quite figured out. I think... ahh,
squeen avatar
squeen
Moderator
From Maryland, USA
Who joined May 9, 2003, 6:10 a.m.
Wrote the following at Sept. 2, 2005, 3:23 a.m...
Do a man pciba.
The PCI Bus Adpater makes getting those addresses very easy.
TeeTylerToe
Who joined Sept. 13, 2004, 11:56 p.m.
Wrote the following at Sept. 2, 2005, 4:41 a.m...
yea, I'm trying a different way, iirc some address is attached to a vertex on the hwgraph, and I think it's the BAR. there are also a couple other trees I'm barking up WRT that.
squeen avatar
squeen
Moderator
From Maryland, USA
Who joined May 9, 2003, 6:10 a.m.
Wrote the following at Sept. 2, 2005, 5:59 a.m...
The hwgraph entry is due to the pciba. Same method.
ruckusman avatar
ruckusman
From Australia
Who joined Jan. 11, 2004, 7:15 a.m.
Wrote the following at Sept. 2, 2005, 9:04 a.m...
Is the Solaris source a serious potential starting point for this?

From what Unixmuseum has written both firewire and if I remember correctly USB work flawlessly on his new Sun Blade.

Wouldn't any Solaris vs Irix differences be accounted for by the system files (development libraries, headers etc etc) already in place that the source was compiled with?

I may be coming from a totally ignorant viewpoint here..in fact I'm sure of it.

I haven't read the licence yet, but seems we may have a really good starting point.