SGI Altix 350

[Brent Casavant]

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, Robert Nagy wrote:

> If I do a contiune from there the box hangs.
> And that is it. Linux uses relocatable but I have no idea if that
> has anything to do with this. 

As the person who wrote the ELILO relocatable support...

Yes, that certainly has something to do with it, though it's by far
not the only issue you'll run into.

Relocatable, by the way, means that the loader is free to place the
loaded kernel at a physical address other than that specified by the
ELF headers.  Since Altix has a discontiguous memory space, and as
you are not even guaranteed that memory exists starting at address
zero, the loader needs this capability.  As I recall, Linux itself
was modified to handle being loaded somewhere other than where it
expects -- though I didn't do that work myself, so my memory is
fuzzy.

I suspect that things will work slightly better for you once an ACPI
enabled PROM is available for the Altix, though I'm sure there'll be
many other issues to address.  Considering the huge amount of kernel
work originally required to get Linux even minimally booting on Altix,
I don't expect we'll soon see FreeBSD running on it.

Brent