8 ms·

Linux 5.5 to Offer Mainline Support for SGI's Octane MIPS Workstations

112 points by dcminter 7y ago

dkackman11 7y ago
I recall using these at university for heavy duty GIS raster processing. IRIX was my first *nix experience.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I'm really eager to know how long ago and what kind of GIS software you used.
  - ecommerceguy 7y ago
    While ArcInfo was certainly supported on Irix I'd venture a guess and say Erdas Imagine for "heavy lifting" raster. Remote Sensing was such a fun class.
    - Waterluvian 7y ago
      Agreed. Holy cow did I have fun in my remote sensing classes. I'll still remember learning about false color composites from landsat ETM+ data. The first time vegetation just popped out and I was hooked. My guess is on Erdas Imagine too. That or some more programmatic stuff like an OGR/GDAL pipeline.
- lwhi 7y ago
  I used these at university too. modelling and animating using Softimage 3D in 1998. Makes me feel very old!
Tepix 7y ago
Is there a clever way of hooking SSDs to the SCSI ports of these old computers?
- jibanes 7y ago
  Instead, you should netboot them, and run nfsroot; works with irix so I suspect it will work with linux; dhcpd will inform of the tftp location of the kernel and pass the right parameters, should be doable and faster, more reliable. Now what I wonder is if X11/Xorg supports any of these framebuffers.
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    It's not like nfs has parity with a local posix-compliant filesystem. O_APPEND for example is inherently racy and emulated on nfs last I checked. But sure, if you're just tooling around, nfsroot is convenient.
- Zenst 7y ago
  I've seen SCSI adapters of many types - SD card ones as well, don't have any direct product I could link, google pulled up many avenues - including this: https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/upgrades/sgi-%28silicon-graphics%29/octane https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/upgrades/sgi-%28silicon-graph... though didn't see SGI on list, so hard to rabbit hole that one without using live chat perhaps and may well be a legacy placeholder that time forgot. Though network booting and storage may well be an easier avenue and cheaper. If you already have a NAS, that may well be the easiest path.
  - hapless 7y ago
    The on-board NIC in an octane is 10/100, so network anything will be painful. It's possible to install gigE, but you will need a PCI-X shoebox and also a NIC with compatible firmware. Not super easy to find.
    - rbranson 7y ago
      How so? I’ve never seen a gigE port that didn’t also support 10/100.
      - 7y ago
uncle_j 7y ago
Been wanting one of these machines for years, but they are sooo pricey it is insane. Mainline Linux support will be good, but I tbh I would be running IRIX as intended.
- MisterTea 7y ago
  That is an interesting problem. In the 00's they were cheap and plentiful. Buying old SGI hardware to play with was pretty affordable. Now people want thousands. Same with old x86 hardware.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Older x86 hardware is incredibly cheap and plentiful in my experience. Of course stuff goes up in price as it ages and gets rarer, but that's just expected.
    - leoc 7y ago
      Apparently there are specific highly-prized things which are in short supply, like Sound Blaster audio cards.
  - idiot900 7y ago
    Why are these machines so expensive? Is there some legacy software that cannot be ported?
    - laurentdc 7y ago
      Probably just retro collecting craze driving prices up. e.g. 10 years ago people were dumping CRT monitors, now a decent Sony Trinitron starts at 150-200 €
      - uncle_j 7y ago
        That is more true of old x86 hardware and older micro-computers (Amigas, Ataris etc). The SGI machines are difficult to get hold of in the UK to begin with plus they are as other said short supply. There is one Octane in the country and it is the machine only (even though the monitor and keyboard are pictured) and it is going for about £800 on ebay. If it was everything I would have said "that probably the best deal I am going to get" and went for it.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Definitely cool for geek points but can't be terribly power efficient. Wonder how a NUC installed inside one of the drive bays would compare?
etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
It seems to be my understanding that Linux will allow supporting any hardware or software API as long as at least a few people care about it. It doesn't matter how old or impractical it is. This is not a criticism, but I would like to deeply understand, what does Linux leadership want it to be? An OS that just runs on anything for the sake of it? It already seems true that Linux aspires to be much more than what UNIX is. It can be a dumping ground of sorts for your ideas and research projects. As long as the code does something useful enough without corrupting the entire system, it seems to be fair game. That is kind of freeing and it would stand to benefit the project to be communicated more directly. These are my observations.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > It seems to be my understanding that Linux will allow supporting any hardware or software API as long as at least a few people care about it. It doesn't matter how old or impractical it is. It's not quite like that, there's quite a bit of hardware support that has been dropped along the way. It's not enough for people to care about stuff, they have to care about it enough that they maintain that support in line with kernel devs' expectations. That's not always easy.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  A counterexample would be that most other open source Unixes' "MVP-level" of hardware support meant that none of them gained much traction and market share. The real world does not run entirely on Thinkpads.
  - msla 7y ago
    More to the point, the real world doesn't run entirely on Real Computers. It happens again and again: There's a plateau of Real Computers, where Real People do Real Work, because they wouldn't deign to deal with the oddities and lack of performance peasants put up with on their Bitty Boxes. Then something nasty happens, and those Bitty Boxes become more capable without becoming correspondingly more expensive. All of a sudden, the companies selling Real Computers no longer have a value proposition: Their stuff may not be hugely more capable, but at least it's massively more expensive! Eventually, not even the Real People can continue to ignore the fact the Toys are smoking them in every benchmarkable metric aside from cool factor. It happened to DEC when minicomputers fell to PCs, and it happened to Sun and SGI when the "workstation" category got folded into the "somewhat-more-expensive-than-usual PC" category. Linux originally ignored the extreme low-end PCs, but in 1991, it was pretty clear than 16-bit x86 CPUs were more trouble than they were worth in the Unix-like world and it wasn't a good move to mutilate the kernel to fit on a kind of system which was rapidly becoming obsolete. However, Linux is not ignoring the current Bitty Boxes, the SBCs which can run the kernel with no compromises once you navigate the weirdness of ARM-based hardware. (Yes, there is a project to run Linux on 16-bit x86 chips and other MMU-less CPUs. It's called ELKS and it was never very active.) https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks
jandrese 7y ago
Why just Octane? Indy, O2, and Indigos were way more common. Is it just that there are no surviving X drivers for the other platforms?
- hapless 7y ago
  Indy and Indigo r4k support was merged in 20 years ago.
- nikanj 7y ago
  Nobody stepped up to deliver those? The most common answer in open source
- cjbprime 7y ago
  How do you know those aren't already supported?
- ddingus 7y ago
  O2 has a specialized graphics sub-system. Copper? Anyway, it is a shared memory system, and under IRIX, that was done dynamically. The same chips were used in their NT visual workstations. Those did not manage the graphics memory dynamically, but were capable in every other way. At the time, one could push 500mb plus images around like nothing. Was a big deal. SGI did Linux drivers, and the SGI / Microsoft Farenheit project got in the way. Those never left SGI for legal reasons. Had that happened, perhaps Linux for an O2 would make sense. I am not sure that system has ever seen a low level document release.
  - sillywalk 7y ago
    I believe the O2's chipset was actually called CRM. The 1st gen Visual Workstations had a different chipset called 'Cobalt', but also had a Unified Memory Architecture.
    - ddingus 7y ago
      That is what I was remembering. The two shared the same graphics core. Cobalt. I knew Copper was not quite right. That is Amiga. Anyway, at the time, PC busses were slow, and one could get a fair amount of RAM on either side of it and sort of do what that system did easy. The plan was to get that graphics system into Linux proper, and legal got in the way. All we ended up with was a frame buffer and no real docs for the graphics chipset that I ever knew of. Too bad. We may have seen some very differentiated PC innovation a bit earlier. If one wanted to do things like real time sub pixel accurate compositing, or mapping video onto dynamically changing surfaces, etc... anything requiring either/or large image data, high throughput between gfx, CPU and RAM, the performance was exemplary. A lot of that was true on a few hundred Mhz O2 as well as the 1ghz Visual Workstations. I spent a fair amount of time using both. Pretty sweet for the time period.
Havoc 7y ago
Pretty tame announcement overall. Little ominous though how heavily it’s reliant on linus being available. I hope the business continuity planning is up to spec
notaplumber 7y ago
https://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html https://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html "The OpenBSD/sgi port was discontinued after the 6.5 release." That said, it was a very mature port and ran on many models, in 64-bit mode. The code remains in -current for now.. the last release, 6.5 is a complete modern (was released in 2019) Unix operating system, which is more than can be said for running IRIX or Linux on these machines. I'm not even _aware_ of any binary distros of Linux for these. And good luck building your own kernel and userland.
- mrpippy 7y ago
  I missed that when it happened, too bad. OpenBSD's sgi hardware support is much better than NetBSD's (although that I guess the reason is that they used an Origin 350 for builds, but the disk controller driver had a bug causing lockups and FS corruption which never got fixed. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=156941089510768&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=156941089510768&w=2 I also remember Miod Vallat doing a lot of the work on sgi, but he left the project a few years ago.
macdice 7y ago
The Indy was a really important machine in my journey and I occasionally think I should pick one up for nostalgic use... but... meh, Irix is frozen (there is no OpenIRIX soldiering on...) and if I ran say FreeBSD on it, it'd just be a really slow machine that doesn't have enough RAM to build x, y or z. At least, that's how I talk myself out of turning my house into a tech museum!
- ddingus 7y ago
  Later IRIX .28 and above has an active community. I feel the same. Indy amd O2 were amazing computers. I got rid of all my SGI gear. Every so often I feel a pang of regret...
anentropic 7y ago
SGI always had the coolest looking computers

112 points by dcminter 7y ago

dkackman11 7y ago

I recall using these at university for heavy duty GIS raster processing. IRIX was my first *nix experience.

Waterluvian 7y ago
I'm really eager to know how long ago and what kind of GIS software you used.
- ecommerceguy 7y ago
  While ArcInfo was certainly supported on Irix I'd venture a guess and say Erdas Imagine for "heavy lifting" raster. Remote Sensing was such a fun class.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    Agreed. Holy cow did I have fun in my remote sensing classes. I'll still remember learning about false color composites from landsat ETM+ data. The first time vegetation just popped out and I was hooked. My guess is on Erdas Imagine too. That or some more programmatic stuff like an OGR/GDAL pipeline.
lwhi 7y ago
I used these at university too. modelling and animating using Softimage 3D in 1998. Makes me feel very old!

Tepix 7y ago

Is there a clever way of hooking SSDs to the SCSI ports of these old computers?

jibanes 7y ago
Instead, you should netboot them, and run nfsroot; works with irix so I suspect it will work with linux; dhcpd will inform of the tftp location of the kernel and pass the right parameters, should be doable and faster, more reliable. Now what I wonder is if X11/Xorg supports any of these framebuffers.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  It's not like nfs has parity with a local posix-compliant filesystem. O_APPEND for example is inherently racy and emulated on nfs last I checked. But sure, if you're just tooling around, nfsroot is convenient.
Zenst 7y ago
I've seen SCSI adapters of many types - SD card ones as well, don't have any direct product I could link, google pulled up many avenues - including this: https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/upgrades/sgi-%28silicon-graphics%29/octane https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/upgrades/sgi-%28silicon-graph... though didn't see SGI on list, so hard to rabbit hole that one without using live chat perhaps and may well be a legacy placeholder that time forgot. Though network booting and storage may well be an easier avenue and cheaper. If you already have a NAS, that may well be the easiest path.
- hapless 7y ago
  The on-board NIC in an octane is 10/100, so network anything will be painful. It's possible to install gigE, but you will need a PCI-X shoebox and also a NIC with compatible firmware. Not super easy to find.
  - rbranson 7y ago
    How so? I’ve never seen a gigE port that didn’t also support 10/100.
    - 7y ago

uncle_j 7y ago

Been wanting one of these machines for years, but they are sooo pricey it is insane. Mainline Linux support will be good, but I tbh I would be running IRIX as intended.

MisterTea 7y ago
That is an interesting problem. In the 00's they were cheap and plentiful. Buying old SGI hardware to play with was pretty affordable. Now people want thousands. Same with old x86 hardware.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Older x86 hardware is incredibly cheap and plentiful in my experience. Of course stuff goes up in price as it ages and gets rarer, but that's just expected.
  - leoc 7y ago
    Apparently there are specific highly-prized things which are in short supply, like Sound Blaster audio cards.
- idiot900 7y ago
  Why are these machines so expensive? Is there some legacy software that cannot be ported?
  - laurentdc 7y ago
    Probably just retro collecting craze driving prices up. e.g. 10 years ago people were dumping CRT monitors, now a decent Sony Trinitron starts at 150-200 €
    - uncle_j 7y ago
      That is more true of old x86 hardware and older micro-computers (Amigas, Ataris etc). The SGI machines are difficult to get hold of in the UK to begin with plus they are as other said short supply. There is one Octane in the country and it is the machine only (even though the monitor and keyboard are pictured) and it is going for about £800 on ebay. If it was everything I would have said "that probably the best deal I am going to get" and went for it.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Definitely cool for geek points but can't be terribly power efficient. Wonder how a NUC installed inside one of the drive bays would compare?

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago

It seems to be my understanding that Linux will allow supporting any hardware or software API as long as at least a few people care about it. It doesn't matter how old or impractical it is. This is not a criticism, but I would like to deeply understand, what does Linux leadership want it to be? An OS that just runs on anything for the sake of it? It already seems true that Linux aspires to be much more than what UNIX is. It can be a dumping ground of sorts for your ideas and research projects. As long as the code does something useful enough without corrupting the entire system, it seems to be fair game. That is kind of freeing and it would stand to benefit the project to be communicated more directly. These are my observations.

zozbot234 7y ago
> It seems to be my understanding that Linux will allow supporting any hardware or software API as long as at least a few people care about it. It doesn't matter how old or impractical it is. It's not quite like that, there's quite a bit of hardware support that has been dropped along the way. It's not enough for people to care about stuff, they have to care about it enough that they maintain that support in line with kernel devs' expectations. That's not always easy.
sansnomme 7y ago
A counterexample would be that most other open source Unixes' "MVP-level" of hardware support meant that none of them gained much traction and market share. The real world does not run entirely on Thinkpads.
- msla 7y ago
  More to the point, the real world doesn't run entirely on Real Computers. It happens again and again: There's a plateau of Real Computers, where Real People do Real Work, because they wouldn't deign to deal with the oddities and lack of performance peasants put up with on their Bitty Boxes. Then something nasty happens, and those Bitty Boxes become more capable without becoming correspondingly more expensive. All of a sudden, the companies selling Real Computers no longer have a value proposition: Their stuff may not be hugely more capable, but at least it's massively more expensive! Eventually, not even the Real People can continue to ignore the fact the Toys are smoking them in every benchmarkable metric aside from cool factor. It happened to DEC when minicomputers fell to PCs, and it happened to Sun and SGI when the "workstation" category got folded into the "somewhat-more-expensive-than-usual PC" category. Linux originally ignored the extreme low-end PCs, but in 1991, it was pretty clear than 16-bit x86 CPUs were more trouble than they were worth in the Unix-like world and it wasn't a good move to mutilate the kernel to fit on a kind of system which was rapidly becoming obsolete. However, Linux is not ignoring the current Bitty Boxes, the SBCs which can run the kernel with no compromises once you navigate the weirdness of ARM-based hardware. (Yes, there is a project to run Linux on 16-bit x86 chips and other MMU-less CPUs. It's called ELKS and it was never very active.) https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

jandrese 7y ago

Why just Octane? Indy, O2, and Indigos were way more common. Is it just that there are no surviving X drivers for the other platforms?

hapless 7y ago
Indy and Indigo r4k support was merged in 20 years ago.
nikanj 7y ago
Nobody stepped up to deliver those? The most common answer in open source
cjbprime 7y ago
How do you know those aren't already supported?
ddingus 7y ago
O2 has a specialized graphics sub-system. Copper? Anyway, it is a shared memory system, and under IRIX, that was done dynamically. The same chips were used in their NT visual workstations. Those did not manage the graphics memory dynamically, but were capable in every other way. At the time, one could push 500mb plus images around like nothing. Was a big deal. SGI did Linux drivers, and the SGI / Microsoft Farenheit project got in the way. Those never left SGI for legal reasons. Had that happened, perhaps Linux for an O2 would make sense. I am not sure that system has ever seen a low level document release.
- sillywalk 7y ago
  I believe the O2's chipset was actually called CRM. The 1st gen Visual Workstations had a different chipset called 'Cobalt', but also had a Unified Memory Architecture.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    That is what I was remembering. The two shared the same graphics core. Cobalt. I knew Copper was not quite right. That is Amiga. Anyway, at the time, PC busses were slow, and one could get a fair amount of RAM on either side of it and sort of do what that system did easy. The plan was to get that graphics system into Linux proper, and legal got in the way. All we ended up with was a frame buffer and no real docs for the graphics chipset that I ever knew of. Too bad. We may have seen some very differentiated PC innovation a bit earlier. If one wanted to do things like real time sub pixel accurate compositing, or mapping video onto dynamically changing surfaces, etc... anything requiring either/or large image data, high throughput between gfx, CPU and RAM, the performance was exemplary. A lot of that was true on a few hundred Mhz O2 as well as the 1ghz Visual Workstations. I spent a fair amount of time using both. Pretty sweet for the time period.

Havoc 7y ago

Pretty tame announcement overall. Little ominous though how heavily it’s reliant on linus being available. I hope the business continuity planning is up to spec

notaplumber 7y ago

https://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html https://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html "The OpenBSD/sgi port was discontinued after the 6.5 release." That said, it was a very mature port and ran on many models, in 64-bit mode. The code remains in -current for now.. the last release, 6.5 is a complete modern (was released in 2019) Unix operating system, which is more than can be said for running IRIX or Linux on these machines. I'm not even _aware_ of any binary distros of Linux for these. And good luck building your own kernel and userland.

mrpippy 7y ago
I missed that when it happened, too bad. OpenBSD's sgi hardware support is much better than NetBSD's (although that I guess the reason is that they used an Origin 350 for builds, but the disk controller driver had a bug causing lockups and FS corruption which never got fixed. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=156941089510768&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=156941089510768&w=2 I also remember Miod Vallat doing a lot of the work on sgi, but he left the project a few years ago.

macdice 7y ago

The Indy was a really important machine in my journey and I occasionally think I should pick one up for nostalgic use... but... meh, Irix is frozen (there is no OpenIRIX soldiering on...) and if I ran say FreeBSD on it, it'd just be a really slow machine that doesn't have enough RAM to build x, y or z. At least, that's how I talk myself out of turning my house into a tech museum!

ddingus 7y ago
Later IRIX .28 and above has an active community. I feel the same. Indy amd O2 were amazing computers. I got rid of all my SGI gear. Every so often I feel a pang of regret...

anentropic 7y ago

SGI always had the coolest looking computers