BSD on SGI machines

[Brent Casavant]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Christian Hildner wrote:

> has anyone ever tested freebsd on SGI Itanium machines?

Not that I'm aware of.  Also, the Altix machines have a very different
system architecture, such that I can pretty much guarantee that FreeBSD
IA64 won't work as-is -- it's really not even worth trying.

I'm not sure what SGI's stance would be on releasing the necessary
documentation to make BSD work.  Several years ago I managed to
get a VP to agree to release some information for the Indigo R4000
machines so that the NetBSD folks could use it -- but I think he
agreed mostly because the machine was beyond even hardware spares
support at that point.  That said, that effort predated any real
public Linux involvement by SGI, so maybe the outlook on hardware
specs has changed.

Your best bet, if you wanted to start adding support, might be divining
hardware programming information from Linux kernel source (though of
course not directly using their code).

Brent

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