[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Jul 6, 2010, at 5:15 AM, Marc Lörner wrote:

> Hello list, Marcel!
> As I already told you my company has bought an SGI-atlix 450.
> As this testsystem is now not used anymore by anyone in the foreseeable future, I got the admission to try FreeBSD on it.
> 
> So what can I do to help bringing/running FreeBSD on this machine?
> What are the first steps to take, because I can vaguely remember that install won't work out of the box from the released CD-images?
> 
> @Marcel: Have you made some progress on FreeBSD, Numa and your Altix?

Yes, somewhat. The major blocker is a lack of interrupt support,
because the Altix doesn't have SAPICs. But before I can work on
interrupt support I need a driver that doesn't fail to allocate
DMA memory. This may need support for the I/O MMU. If so, that
I/O MMU support is the first blocker to resolve.

Other than that, FreeBSD boots with the changes (and kluges) I
have on the altix branch.

If you want to see if and how well FreeBSD boots on the 450, you
need to checkout svn+ssh://svn.freebsd.org/base/projects/altix,
build a kernel using the ALTIX configuration and boot that under
EFI. You also need to build a loader from that branch, because
the standard loader won't work. Devices won't attach, but you
should find all hardware and be asked for the root mount point.

FYI,

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt at mac.com