Flameman/sgi

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= machine =

add on board support
note: if you inclide the gfx framebuffer support in the kernel, then you CAN NOT boot with missing gfx hw board! The kernel is expecting to find it, if it is missing it will panic!

Suggestion: do not include the framebuffer, use uart console only

add on board support
about sgi o2

add on board support
What is the state of hardware support on this machine?


 * V6, V8 gfx: X11 support doesn't exist, and likely won't for a very long while. Stan (the IP30 Port Author) recently got console mode running on this card, but from what I understand, this is a rather complex piece of video hardware. Remote X works, however.
 * Impact gfx: X11 is working
 * Onboard sound works well enough from what I hear. I tested several MP3s from console via mpg123, and they worked well. A new patch coming out next week (Jul 23-24) will enable support for the optical inputs/outputs for AES (ADAT capabilities will not be supported).
 * Onboard Scsi works like a charm. It wasn't entirely usable about 3 weeks ago due to reliance on the old qlogicisp driver, but with some very recent fixes to qla1280, it has replaced qlogicisp. I now run a RAID5 array using 3 50G seagate drives on my Octane, and so far, everything works great (and hdparm reports ~17.4MB/s throughput).
 * Onboard Ethernet works fine too. The IOC3 driver was recently re-written to make IOC3 more of a Bus device with peripherals hanging off of it, which makes IOC3 less of a nightmare device from a coder's standpoint (but not by much).

dual boot
It should be possible if you set up IRIX as per normal and leave space on the drive for Linux. Install Linux as per the guide except when you get to set up the PROM. you'll want to leave that as is. Then you'd set up arcload to boot up Linux on demand.


 * To boot IRIX, just switch the machine on.
 * To boot Linux, drop to the monitor prompt and run boot -f arcload.