What is the current state of the Octane/IP30 support?

What is the current state of the Octane/IP30 support?

[Ed Stafford]

I have a single-proc Octane at home that I've decided should be
running with Linux, but I have been reading up online about the
Experimental nature of the kernel in relation to the hardware.  Since
most of the info I found was dated 2006, I wanted to ask your (as a
group) opinion on how stable / usable the Octane is today with the
current kernel.

I'm not adverse to bleeding edge, I just want to know whether or not
I'll be struggling on something that just doesn't have enough drivers
written for it to make it usable.

Just in case anyone asks, I'll probably be using Gentoo, but I'm not
glued to that distro.  (I'm very agnostic and just prefer it to work
the best vs. distro-warring..)

Thanks a bunch!

Ed

Re: What is the current state of the Octane/IP30 support?

[Kumba]

Ed Stafford wrote:
> I have a single-proc Octane at home that I've decided should be
> running with Linux, but I have been reading up online about the
> Experimental nature of the kernel in relation to the hardware.  Since
> most of the info I found was dated 2006, I wanted to ask your (as a
> group) opinion on how stable / usable the Octane is today with the
> current kernel.
> 
> I'm not adverse to bleeding edge, I just want to know whether or not
> I'll be struggling on something that just doesn't have enough drivers
> written for it to make it usable.
> 
> Just in case anyone asks, I'll probably be using Gentoo, but I'm not
> glued to that distro.  (I'm very agnostic and just prefer it to work
> the best vs. distro-warring..)
> 
> Thanks a bunch!

Right now, Gentoo does have the best support for them (mine is running 
2.6.23-rc5 about 3.5ft from me as I type).  But I do believe the debian guys 
have been working on a debian install image for them too (tbm/ths, am I right on 
this?)

For the most part, Impact-based systems run great.  You get X, unaccelerated, no 
3D, and a framebuffer.  VPro, framebuffer, but no X.  USB kinda weorks if you 
have a PCI-Card Cage and a OHCI chipsets (UHCI is dead last I checked), and I 
think EHCI works fine.  Haven't tried much else beyond those PCI devices.

A lot of the other XIO Boards, outside of the Impact or Vpro boards, are wholly 
untested, and likely won't work at all.  Nor do I think dual head will work if 
you have a second Impact card kicking around.

For gentoo, we have an "RC6" livecd.  I've played with building an RC7 several 
times, but that got sidetracked about 2-3 months ago.  I hope to resume work on 
it soon.  You can find that and the current netboots on your local gentoo 
mirror, in the experimental/mips sub-folders.

Further gentoo questions regarding this system should be directed to the 
gentoo-mips ML; linux-mips here is more for distro-agnostic development.

Have fun!  (and what Proc, btw?)


--Kumba

-- 
Gentoo/MIPS Team Lead

"Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands 
do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."  --Elrond

Re: What is the current state of the Octane/IP30 support?

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Wed, 3 Oct 2007, Kumba wrote:
> For the most part, Impact-based systems run great.  You get X, unaccelerated,
> no 3D, and a framebuffer.  VPro, framebuffer, but no X.  USB kinda weorks if
                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
What's the reason for not having X? X doesn't support the frame buffer layout?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds

Re: What is the current state of the Octane/IP30 support?

[Martin Michlmayr]

* Kumba <kumba@gentoo.org> [2007-10-03 02:06]:
> Right now, Gentoo does have the best support for them (mine is
> running 2.6.23-rc5 about 3.5ft from me as I type).  But I do believe
> the debian guys have been working on a debian install image for them
> too (tbm/ths, am I right on this?)

We don't really have any official support for Octane in Debian at the
moment.
-- 
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/

Re: What is the current state of the Octane/IP30 support?

[Ed Stafford]

On 10/3/07, Kumba <kumba@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Right now, Gentoo does have the best support for them (mine is running
> 2.6.23-rc5 about 3.5ft from me as I type).  But I do believe the debian guys
> have been working on a debian install image for them too (tbm/ths, am I right on
> this?)
>
> For the most part, Impact-based systems run great.  You get X, unaccelerated, no
> 3D, and a framebuffer.  VPro, framebuffer, but no X.  USB kinda weorks if you
> have a PCI-Card Cage and a OHCI chipsets (UHCI is dead last I checked), and I
> think EHCI works fine.  Haven't tried much else beyond those PCI devices.

I had wondered about being able to use any PCI card in that cage..
I'll have to give that a shot.

> A lot of the other XIO Boards, outside of the Impact or Vpro boards, are wholly
> untested, and likely won't work at all.  Nor do I think dual head will work if
> you have a second Impact card kicking around.
>
> For gentoo, we have an "RC6" livecd.  I've played with building an RC7 several
> times, but that got sidetracked about 2-3 months ago.  I hope to resume work on
> it soon.  You can find that and the current netboots on your local gentoo
> mirror, in the experimental/mips sub-folders.
>
> Further gentoo questions regarding this system should be directed to the
> gentoo-mips ML; linux-mips here is more for distro-agnostic development.
>
> Have fun!  (and what Proc, btw?)

Single 195MHz.  I've been looking at a dual-360MHz, but it's tough to
win those auctions!

Ed

Re: What is the current state of the Octane/IP30 support?

[Stuart Longland]

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Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Oct 2007, Kumba wrote:
>> For the most part, Impact-based systems run great.  You get X, unaccelerated,
>> no 3D, and a framebuffer.  VPro, framebuffer, but no X.  USB kinda weorks if
>                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> What's the reason for not having X? X doesn't support the frame buffer layout?
> 
> Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

My understanding, is there are two problems:

o VPro (and IMPACT) have its own dedicated memory separate from the
system memory, thus one cannot use fbdev to run X.  ("framebuffer"
perhaps is bad terminology)
o No-one except SGI seems to know how to load images into the video
memory using DMA.  Thus the shadowfb approach used to construct the
IMPACT X11 driver, isn't possible for VPro.

If someone could figure the latter problem out... we could have full
VPro support, including OpenGL, which would be sweet.  But apparently
this has been less than trivial to achieve.  Certainly well beyond my
limited skills. ;-)

Regards,
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter)              .'''.
Gentoo Linux/MIPS Cobalt and Docs Developer  '.'` :
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   .'.'
http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter             :.'

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.


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