SGI: Hardware

Sorry for the newbie question, but I'm wondering what is the smallest SGI workstation? Indy I presume?

alexott wrote: Sorry for the newbie question, but I'm wondering what is the smallest SGI workstation? Indy I presume?

The Indy is the smallest, volume wise. But if you look at the motherboard only, the O2 is even a bit smaller.

Thank you, miod!

Which leads to things like this - http://www.jumboprawn.net/jesse/projs/laptop.html

I think the Indy is by far the most space-saving workstation as well: you can put things on it (monitors, other systems, etc). You can't really stack stuff on an O2.

josehill wrote: Which leads to things like this - http://www.jumboprawn.net/jesse/projs/laptop.html

I think I saw it earlier. The fun

ClassicHasClass wrote: I think the Indy is by far the most space-saving workstation as well: you can put things on it (monitors, other systems, etc). You can't really stack stuff on an O2.

Thanks! This is where pizza boxes / desktops rule.

i wonder if someday we will se an INDY synthesized into fpga, this day we will have an IRIS laptop, or PDA.
Actually we do not have enough information about firmware and hardware, every SGI-hw emulators have been dropped
may be just a dream

Indy hardware seems to be most documented amongst others according to this post: viewtopic.php?p=116907#p116907
FPGA is really a panacea for an aging hardware. There are already FPGA clones of old Amiga models, so maybe we well see same for SGI machines some day. This just needs some heavy lifting of reverse engineering, developing etc.

alexott wrote: Indy hardware seems to be most documented

well, we know something because SGI has released something (and more specifically about the gfx, for the most), but it is not enough.

alexott wrote: FPGA is really a panacea for an aging hardware. There are already FPGA clones of old Amiga models

the real problem is: we can't emulate a 200Mhz MIPS CPU plus its gfx pipe with a common cheap fpga (e.g. spartan6 by Xilinx), we need harder fpga (even if under the "enterprise level, e.g. Virtex by Xilinx), which are expensive. So, the resulting hw will go for 500 euro at least.

The MIST project is an example of relative cheap (200 euro) Amiga500 design plus C64 and a lot of 8 bit computers and console. It uses a cheap and common Cyclone* fpga by Altera.

josehill wrote: Which leads to things like this - http://www.jumboprawn.net/jesse/projs/laptop.html

If anyone wants a closer look at the insides, a forum member (geo) actually has an "jumboprawn" O2 laptop purchased directly from the original creator: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16725597&p=7342801&#p7342801

ivelegacy wrote: well, we know something because SGI has released something (and more specifically about the gfx, for the most), but it is not enough.

I'm intersting how far http://www.vanheusden.com/miep/ or http://gxemul.sourceforge.net/gxemul-st ... bsdsgimips will go. Probably some reverse engineering guru could help them.

Looks like it's not a deal to go with SimOS viewtopic.php?p=116966#p116966 And I suppose adjusting zones layout means also adjusting IRIX kernel built for it. But we have no sources of that kernel

the real problem is: we can't emulate a 200Mhz MIPS CPU plus its gfx pipe with a common cheap fpga (e.g. spartan6 by Xilinx), we need harder fpga (even if under the "enterprise level, e.g. Virtex by Xilinx), which are expensive. So, the resulting hw will go for 500 euro at least.

I wonder whether there are new ABI compatible MIPS CPUs to offload this task from FPGA scheme? Or mixed design is not possible? Also selling as non-assembled i.e. kit should drop price a bit.

recondas wrote: If anyone wants a closer look at the insides, a forum member (geo) actually has an "jumboprawn" O2 laptop purchased directly from the original creator: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16725597&p=7342801&#p7342801

Thanks for bringing it here. So this thing is real

Emulation of IRIX is fruitless guys. Just sit back and enjoy the hardware we have. If you want more, best phone up Rackable and beg them to open source IRIX and the other IP surrounding it.

TeamBlackFox wrote: If you want more, best phone up Rackable and beg them to open source IRIX and the other IP surrounding it.

We need petition but I doubt it will get enough votes... Right, it's better to relax and wait another 20 years more before they release it open source as good-will gesture If they do this ever.
But this will open another can of worms. As it will be fully open people will go porting it to the modern MIPS hardware. And maybe porting to x86 and writing binary translator to run apps of heritage.

If you want to start a new petition then share it on Reddit and other sites, I can write up a few paragraphs explaining how it would benefit the Linux, BSD and other communities and why they should care. I'm just not motivated enough to do a petition the right way.

I would like to, but I'm not good in english
We already have an IRIX Interactive Desktop freeing petition https://www.change.org/p/silicon-graphi ... ve-desktop It was advertised on things like Twitter, but people got no interest.
What would be good after starting IRIX open source petition is to ask each forum member to sign it (by sending mass PMs?). This will give initial amount of votes. After that members with good SGI background could explain the need of it and defend it in flames on places like Reddit to give another mass of votes.

No, we're not using an old petition. We would need a new petition. I can do the writing but someone else has to manage it and find out the best way to contact SGI's management/executives.

If somebody starts a petition, I'll vote for it just on principle. It'd be terrific to be able to port IRIX to, say, that Yeelong MIPS laptop and have it on the go, just for the hell of it

• miep, aims for emulating indy
• gxemu, aims for emulating O2

i think they come from a pure reverse engineering activity, something that deal with disassembly the PROM and trying to figure the hardware, and unfortunately, as result, they are not usable at all (miep is in its earlier stage, really it's more a proof of concept than a usable application)

about the kit price, we are talking about fpgas that costs 50 euro each, and we need 2 fpgas at least, so 100 euro of pure cost for fpga, then you have 300 euro of PCB, plus the service to solder components on PCB (you can't do it with hobbistic reflow station)

the result is …. a very expensive kit, and the problem about the price drop: you have to sell a lot of kits to drop the price, so i wander how many people could be interested in a portable IRIX laptop designed around MIPS32 core (which has to be evaluated carefully)

you cannot have R10K in this design: too heavy design, what you can have is a MIPS32 core within {50..400Mhz} (max 400Mhz means low-end enterprise fpga, and license for time analysis under FPGA synthesizer, which is out of the web pack free license )

btw, i am working on a MIPS R3000 soft core, it is written in VHDL, it has a pipeline, and it performs 40MIPS at 50Mhz of clock. It has a few hw bugs. I do not have any gfx, and numa scheme in mind, i have just a soft core running an assembly mini monitor

as gfx … i do not have a gfx, i have a VDU, something like Yamaha V9958 (from 8 bit Home Computers era, something like MSX2) , which is used as "text console", so no pipe, nothing do deal with the SGI graphics power. Unfortunately, and about me … the kernel of this "toy" will be "XINU".

petition is fine for me, too!

Not to rain on anyone's petition parade, but SGI can't give away what it doesn't own outright. IRIX is based on (licensed from?) UNIX system V Release 4:

in a white paper titled IRIX 6.5 Technical Brief, SGI wrote: As with all IRIX releases, IRIX 6.5 continues to be based upon UNIX System V Release 4.

In 2003, when the "who owns UNIX" lawsuits (and SCO) were in the headlines , SGI released a letter to the open source community describing the effort SGI had undergone to prevent the release of code to which they didn't have legal rights. That letter (there's a link to the entire document below) included the following paragraph:

Over the past four years, SGI has released over a million lines of code
under an open source license. Throughout, we have carried out a
rigorous internal process to ensure that all software contributed by
SGI represents code we are legally entitled to release as open source.

http://oss.sgi.com/letter_100103.txt

It sounds like the relatively small portions of code that SGI did release as OSS cost them a significant amount of money to sanitize. The cost and effort to do that to other portions of IRIX (not to mention the entire IRIX code base) would likely not make financial sense to SGI (or their stockholders).

Sure, but the XSGI, Magic Desktop, 4DWM etc isn't even PART of System V R4, furthermore they should be able to release any non-original SVR4 code. Sounds like poppycock to me as at the time of that letter, 2003, IRIX was still being developed. And now, with Rackable continuing to ignore the original SGI legacy mostly, it makes sense that they've no more commercial interest in these things.