SGI: Hardware

I asked around on #dri-devel. Good news! I was wrong . Well, that's not really the good news. The good news is that what you said appears to be right!

<mattst88|laptop> will radeon kernel modesetting allow the usage of a x86 PCI radeon in a sparc, hppa, or mips box even without a special ROM?
<agd5f> mattst88|laptop: it should

So maybe there is hope for us Linux/AltArch users of enjoying nice, fast, hardware accelerated X11 on our O2s and PA-RISC workstations alike.

I can't wait for it to use with my HPPA boxes, my FX10s are bitchin but I've got no software

also the sparc support will be cool, but in the 25 and 45 the PCI-E is whacked out so you can't use it anyway :/ Not like any of us have those to begin with but O2 + new graphics would be sweet, man, turn on "show window contents" and it really shows the performance hit.

I wrote up a little blog post about this stuff if anyone is interested. http://mattst88.com/blog/?dd=18&mm=07&yyyy=2008

Also, D-EJ915: I love your signature

1 working 1 dead, and they're my friends

You're not the first person to doubt my statements, but a big thanks for bugging the devs yourself and making a nice article for me to link to in the future. After your first responses I was going to go dig up all the old irc / forum posts where I hashed it out the first time, but now I don't have to.

What really surprises me is that more alt-arch people don't know / care about kernel modesetting. I'd think there'd be tons of embedded MIPS / ARM people who program devices with PCI buses (you'd be surprised that this is the majority, and most of the rest have PCIe 1x) who would love this. Just stick in a PC video card and have a low-end desktop environment for debugging / development instead of messing around with serial ports and JTAG.

Why do people want to install Linux on SGI Systems for anyway? Same with Sun, Mac, HPPA, and etc. Why now save some money and hours by just building a PC and just install Linux on it. It looks the same on any other system.

Gray Fox wrote: Why do people want to install Linux on SGI Systems for anyway? Same with Sun, Mac, HPPA, and etc. Why now save some money and hours by just building a PC and just install Linux on it. It looks the same on any other system.

Some people want to use Free Software, which Irix aint. You and I may not agree with putting it on a SGI but it's his choice.

No flame wars and now back on topic.

tillin9 wrote: What really surprises me is that more alt-arch people don't know / care about kernel modesetting. I'd think there'd be tons of embedded MIPS / ARM people who program devices with PCI buses (you'd be surprised that this is the majority, and most of the rest have PCIe 1x) who would love this. Just stick in a PC video card and have a low-end desktop environment for debugging / development instead of messing around with serial ports and JTAG.

In all fairness, for non-Radeons, the driver will have to initialize the card itself. So kernel modesetting won't magically cause all graphics cards to work in MIPS boxes.

It does, however, look good for AtomBIOS enabled Radeons though.

Gray Fox wrote: Why do people want to install Linux on SGI Systems for anyway? Same with Sun, Mac, HPPA, and etc. Why now save some money and hours by just building a PC and just install Linux on it. It looks the same on any other system.

For me, it's a fascination with architectures. I can't totally explain it. It's interesting to me as an assembly programmer for obvious reasons. Otherwise, it's just interesting because it's different. If you've ever done x86 assembly programming, you'll definitely understand my attraction to Alpha, MIPS, and PA-RISC.

This, coupled with the fact that getting a copy of commercial UNIX is both difficult and expensive, makes Linux an obvious choice.

Say I buy an Alpha. I can't easily, or cheaply, get Tru64. Even if I can, I've got to have a separate license to use hardware 3D acceleration offered only by a Radeon 7500 in my configuration. I've got to have another license to use the C++ compiler and another license to access certain features of the Advanced Filesystem.

Compare to Linux: Freely available. Maintained (that is, releases are more than just scheduled maintenance before decommissioning). C++ Compiler is freely available. Only cost involved in 3D acceleration is the time to setup. Plus, I can use my X1550 or even my 9100, both much newer than the 7500.

The situation is quite similar with that of MIPS/IRIX and PA-RISC/HP-UX I'd think.

While AtomBIOS and AMD/ATI's new open source policy makes this a lot easier for radeons, there is no reason why kernel modesetting won't work for all cards. Intel does it themselves, and I'd actually think older cards would have a lot simpler sequence than even an AtomBIOS parsing radeon routine. That leaves Nvidia to be reverse-engineered, and the Nouveau devs seem to think they can do it. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... &px=NjU0Mg

Also note that the radeonhd camp doesn't like AtomBIOS and bit bangs all the registers manually (although the higher ups got a little annoyed since it took much longer to support cards than the radeon folks which used AtomBIOS). AtomBIOS is just a nice interface for register table lookup allowing the same initialization code to reused. It doesn't actually initialize the card itself.

As far as to why, I got into Linux on SGIs since I needed to teach and intro assembly programming course. Most courses either use embedded MIPS devices which make learning very hard because they don't have enough power / memory to compile things themselves or try teaching x86 and confuse the hell out of everyone. In the first case, 9/10 times the problems aren't with understanding the assembly but with getting the program on the embedded device (cross-compiling, bricking the device while flashing) or being able to debug it (JTAG) when something goes wrong. I could just take the proper time to teach everyone how to do all that, but the department and university really look down on skills based classes. One intro to UNIX class was canceled for and I quote "Being too practical." Thus I got a couple of O2s, installed gcc, and was able to stick to Patterson and Hennessy.

tillin9 wrote: While AtomBIOS and AMD/ATI's new open source policy makes this a lot easier for radeons, there is no reason why kernel modesetting won't work for all cards. Intel does it themselves, and I'd actually think older cards would have a lot simpler sequence than even an AtomBIOS parsing radeon routine. That leaves Nvidia to be reverse-engineered, and the Nouveau devs seem to think they can do it. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... &px=NjU0Mg

Yep, probably right.

tillin9 wrote: Also note that the radeonhd camp doesn't like AtomBIOS and bit bangs all the registers manually

Well, used to. http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=12563

It's silly to have two drivers for the same cards, especially when a significant amount of the developers' time is spent copying code from the other driver. Once radeon kernel modesetting hits the kernel, one is going to die off. The kernel developers aren't going to be interested in having two drivers in the kernel for the same hardware that use 80% of the same code.

I've had Debian Sarge (back when that was new) running on one of my Octanes with Dual 300 and ESI graphics. Surprisingly, the speed wasn't bad and it was very usable. I built a cross compile toolchain on one of my other linux boxes and custom built a kernel for it based on the patches from linux-mips.org, then net-booted it. I was able to install Debian-MIPS via NFS. After that, I compiled Xorg with the patches from here: http://www.linux-mips.org/~skylark/ and was able to get Gnome/firefox/etc going with no trouble after that. It was basically a fully functional linux system. The previous link also contains the status of the Octane Drivers, etc. It actually ran fairly well and I didn't have much trouble with it at all. Let it be known that I do very much prefer IRIX though

-Jesse

Hmm - would it be possible to have a single Octane with an Odyssey graphics option installed for IRIX with an (E)SI also installed for Linux/X?

(Presumably a PCI card would be preferable, since IRIX will safely ignore it.)

Just curious...

Probably, I think ARCboot allows for dual boot capability or you could just swap hard drives which is what i used to do. I have had both an Odyssey and an ESI in the same system before and used it to do Dual monitors on IRIX even, so this isn't far fetched at all I wouldn't think. FYI Dual odyssey works well too if you take the carriers off but you have to be really careful inserting them into the machine. Once in they stay pretty well though. Unfortunately it still looks like Odyssey isn't supported in linux. Having both Odyssey and Impact cards in the same system can be a little tricky, I posted awhile back on this here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=12242

Hmm Octane 2 + PCI card cage + Voodoo 3 PCI...

Ryan Fox wrote: Hmm Octane 2 + PCI card cage + Voodoo 3 PCI...

Sounds like a challenging project. But once the sense of accomplishment wears off you'd be left with what, a 600MHz <or slower> system with PCI-based graphics and a commodity operating system?

Sure, but the project is still worth it for pure hack value. Then you dual-boot back to IRIX to do real work. That said, if anyone gets HW-accelerated OpenGL working on any SGI, combined with 5DWM/MaXXDesktop, you might get something useful and IRIXy out of it. (Not that it helps for IRIX apps, of course, but hey...) No harm in trying, right?

Indeed....and someday (as much as I hate to say it) IRIX will no longer be maintained whereas Linux looks like it will be around for the foreseeable future. So maintaining some sort of usefulness on some really cool vintage hardware would be nice... There's no harm in trying.

Just my $0.02
-Jesse

Hmm Octane 2 + PCI card cage + Voodoo 3 PCI...

Interesting, get an tip from Ian that on some point nVidia maked IRIX beta drivers for their current PCI gfx back then, dunno was for TNT or something ? and that was for the Octane indeed ... what a guess - sgi denied the public availability of those - well that`s strange for them no ? who knows where they are now ... in some dusty, dark corner ...