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

[tsuru]

I have fond memories of Octane and O2. Irix was my first unix exposure as I was thrust into helping admin a graphics lab where everyone was there to be artists, not unix people. Luckily Red Hat Linux existed and I somehow found the Unix System Administration Handbook 2nd Ed.

It was the only time I purposely ran `rm -rf /*` because I couldn't find the format command... maybe that's what lead me to find the book above.

[Guest]

Linux is continually refactored often for no reason.

This is not a bad thing, and it leads to the potential removal of support for this machine: changing standards and interfaces for defining drivers.

It makes a lot of sense to refactor a legacy codebase (Linux is almost 30 years old, and that's almost 30 years of continuous development). Bringing code to new standards and rewriting smelly parts leads to a better code base. The problem is that it's not that simple to just run tests on a kernel where some bugs might pop up only on specific hardware configurations, and bugs are inevitable anyway.

[Jumbotron]

Better late than never. But what I REALLY want is for SGI to open source and release to the public the IRIX Interactive Desktop for Linux use.

https://tehtable.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/fm.png

[stormcrow]

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

It scratched someone's itch. Someone with access to an O2 and the expertise to do something about it.

[stormcrow]

It scratched someone's itch. Someone with access to an O2 and the expertise to do something about it.

Edit to add after a moment of thought: It keeps other O2 workstations that may still be functional out of the landfill or from being recycled. Undoubtedly there's more power efficient MIPS hardware around now, but the SGI systems were all built around very interesting hardware, even if largely proprietary.

[edwaleni]

For MIPS its a good thing (I guess). I could think of several workstations of that era that are in the dumpster today that can probably boot a modern kernel, but the real question is, why?

[rene]

Did not see that coming, while I prepared for the same, saves me tons of work rebasing though, so highly appreciated. All the drivers, graphic sound are still left though, including getting initrd to work at least on my side with the vintage arcload boot stuff, guess I should ask him what he is using to boot ;-) https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...enerebe+octane

[rene]

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

because we can and why not?

[elgaard]

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

Maybe some are still in use.
I have an Indigo2 that I used for many years. For some years I used it just for backups.
It has the really nice feature that you can easily set it to wake itself up later. So I kept it in the basement and every night it would boot, run rsync and power itself off again immediately.

I did however scare a few unsuspecting visitors :-)

[torsionbar28]

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.

Yeah bummer, as I got rid of my Octane 2 years ago. I had upgraded it to the max, with dual 600 Mhz cpu's, 8 GB ram, and V12 graphics. Replaced the front light with a blue LED that looked super cool. Yeah it was awesome hardware, but the selection of open source software was pretty limited at the time. I got rid of it mainly because Linux was a pain to install on it, and it didn't run well as the hardware support was poor. Oh well.

Mind you, these workstations were already succeeded by the SGI Octane III a decade ago with Intel x86.

^ This is a bit of a stretch. The "Octane 3" was just a marketing exercise. It shared no lineage whatsoever with the original Octane and Octane 2. Octane 3 was literally just some x86 mobo's in a box. Weak sauce.