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Years Late: Linux 5.5 To Offer Mainline Support For SGI's Octane MIPS Workstations

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  • Years Late: Linux 5.5 To Offer Mainline Support For SGI's Octane MIPS Workstations

    Phoronix: Years Late: Linux 5.5 To Offer Mainline Support For SGI's Octane MIPS Workstations

    The Linux 5.5 kernel due out as stable in early 2020 will finally have mainline support for the MIPS-powered SGI Octane and Octane II workstations that originally ran with SGI's IRIX operating system about two decades ago...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    In my opinion very cool.

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    • #3
      Wow... I had an SGI O2 at home... Would have been very nice if it would run Linux. But I doubt the graphics card would have been supported.
      The opengl demos were awesome, alpha blending desktop windows on top of each other long before it was a thing.

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      • #4
        Erwin would be pleased.

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        • #5
          For those curious about it, here is part one of two from a RMC episode this machine. If I'm not mistaken, those were used on some pretty famous CGI on movies:

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          • #6
            Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Wing Commander 3/4, Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64 devkits). SGI Hardware made most of our childhoods.

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            • #7
              I wonder how long it will take before that support gets yanked out of the mainline kernel.

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              • #8
                Cool thing - I barely remember that I have seen them as a youngster in a Mechanical Design Department.

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                • #9
                  Are there any pragmatic reason for this? Would it help to make Linux kernel more portable or something?

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by DoMiNeLa10 View Post
                    I wonder how long it will take before that support gets yanked out of the mainline kernel.
                    It's not that big of a deal, MIPS hasn't changed that much and your router isn't all that different from the CPU in this machine. Most of what is different there is the perpherials... also a thousand lines of code to make mainline support official isn't that different from what support for the machine that was already being carried along in a non functional state.

                    The largest detriment to the Linux Kernel is code churn... not maintaining machines that haven't changed in 20 years so have low maintenance burden. Code churn introduces new bugs, and breaks old working code. Linux is continually refactored often for no reason.

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