Re: Port to R3000 Indigo

["William J. Earl" <wje@fir.engr.sgi.com>]

Mark A. Zottola writes:
 > 
 > I would like to second Alan's request. Our port of LINUX to the Indigo2 has
 > ground to an unceremonious halt for a lack of hardware documentation. I
 > understand that there are legal considerations. Would it not be possible to
 > release the documentation under some sort of non-disclosure agreement? As
 > we are writing code, if we do not :
 > 
 > 1) include specific citations of the documentation within the comments, or
 > 2) discuss those hardware matters deemed as proprietary within the comments
 > 
 > then it seems we could be able to satisfy any non-disclosure agreement SGI
 > would have while working under the disclosure constraint of the LINUX's
 > GPL. It seems there is an eminently workable way around this if reasonable
 > people can come together to discuss this reasonably.
...

     For serious developers, we can definitely provide the Indy documentation,
which covers quite a bit of Indigo R4000 and Indigo2, although there are 
differences in some places, notably due to those machines using an earlier
revision of the I/O controller (HPC).  We are still working on getting a 
more general policy on release of documentation, including selected bits
of low-level IRIX code (at least where license issues do not arise).  The
Indy situation was a special case, done some time ago.