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Rants & Ramblings

Xorg on O2

Wednesday, 1. April 2009, 15:34:12

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My CRIME driver for Xorg is now more or less complete. Hardware acceleration for xrender supports everything KDE and friends need, missing features have been added ( clipping, framebuffer image downloads, pattern fills etc. ) and the latest version should give some nice speedup as well thanks to increased parallelism between CPU and rendering engine.
With this KDE runs quite well for a machine this old, konqueror is working just fine and nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect after running things like firefox on IRIX.
Right now the only known case where the driver produces visible artifacts is libXaw and the funny way it draws greyed-out menu items ( prominent example: xterm's menu ), something that XAA doesn't even try to accelerate. Guess I'll have to add my own font renderer too.

X on sgimipsWrote a couple drivers

Comments

kikolu 23. May 2009, 02:13

Hey, I own a SGI Octane myself. Good work, and contact me at http://ritchan.dasaku.net if you're interested in getting IMPACT graphics to work on SGIMIPS (I'm using bugmenot)

Also, thank you for bothering to do this.

Chris 28. May 2009, 01:43

I'm trying to get NetBSD installed on an SGI O2 R12000 (IP32). I downloaded the NetBSD/SGIMIPS ISO from ftp://iso.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/iso/5.0/sgimipscd-5.0.iso , Burned the image to CD. When I try >>boot -f pci(0)scsi(0)cdrom(X)rdisk(0)partition(8)ip3xboot at the SGI PROM, it says media isn't loaded, can't recognize the filesystem. Can I install from a CDROM or do I have to use bootp with tftp/nfs ?

Macallan 28. May 2009, 02:29

It's supposed to work but I never did it - netbooting them is too easy, my O2 has a broken CDROM drive and the Indy doesn't even have one.

knoppix 28. August 2009, 06:50

hi Sir Macallan i have an SGI O2 it still boot up but may prob is i dont know the root password,and i want to try netbooting using netbsd as you mention above, if you dont mind can you help me or create a how to for me, i just want to give a life to this BOX(SGI O2) thanks


btw, im newbie :frown:

Macallan 28. August 2009, 11:42

First, the NetBSD/sgimips CD should be bootable. I never tried it because my O2 has a busted CDROM drive and my Indy doesn't have one at all. To netboot wither one of them you need to setup DHCP and TFTP to load a kernel and NFS for a root filesystem ( just untar base.tgz and etc.tgz, then run MAKEDEV all in dev ). Instructions how to netboot are here - it's fairly easy, just assign your machine an IP and hand it a kernel via tftp, the kernel will then ask your dhcp server for a root filesystem, mount it and there you go. If you want to revive am IRIX system like that you're out of luck though, NetBSD can't read xfs. It can read efs though, so you can use a NetBSD box to serve an IRIX install CD to your O2 if the CDROM is busted.
Also, if all you want is to revive your IRIX install you can always just boot an IRIX CD, I'm pretty sure it lets you drop into a shell, mount the root partition and delete the password by hand.
Finally, if you want to run NetBSD try 5.0, older releases have no support for the graphics chip, no audio etc., they're pretty much serial console only. X in -current uses a new Xserver ( Xorg 1.6.3 right now ) which introduced a few new problems, 5.0 ships with Xorg 1.4.2 which works fine. 5.0 supports hardware accelerated graphics in both the console and X, audio, support for the onboard network controller is much better than in earlier releases, pretty much everything works except the video IO stuff. If you have the audio only option you probably won't care. Most drivers for PCI cards will Just Work as well, if you want off the shelf gigabit ethernet, wlan, USB or whatever else IRIX doesn't support.

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