> Hi Gerald,
> 
> I would love to become involved in the project to port to the R3000,
> I know quite a few folks like myself who have R3000 Indigos that
> would have great use for NetBSD. Unfortunately, I think you are
> correct about SGI. I have done quite a bit of research on the web
> about this issue, unfortunately, there is very little information
> about the Indigo, I was mostly able to find information about the
> Indy port. Hmmm .... I wonder what my best approach would be if I
> called SGI ???

Well, for starters, forget calling. SGI have far too much to do at the moment and though it may sound odd, it does actually cost them to provide information to people like us, even if it's for almost
10-year-old hardware. I talked to a kernel engineer at SGI about info for one of the peripheral controller chips for the R4000 Indigo and though technically it's irrelevant in today's world, there
_could_ be third-party intellectual property in the docs for the chip which may not be released without permission. SGI would then have to put an engineer onto the relevant documents and get him to
find someone who can give him a watertight thumbs-up from all the parties concerned for document release. That's very time-consuming and is a costly free gift from SGI and that's frankly not worth
their time.
So, although common sense says a clear "no problem", getting a legal green light is a different kettle of fish altogether.

However, all is not lost. There is a fair amount of information in the Irix header files and, as Jason Thorpe has already pointed out, there is a Plan9 port for the R3000 Indigo floating around
somewhere. If you can dig out the source for that you're essentially home and dry (bar a couple weeks' hacking maybe :-) ).
You may find that AT&T have some odd licensing for Plan9 source, maybe not. I've no idea. Trying to get that Plan9 source will probably be your best bet.

> 
> Me: "Hi, my name is Mike, you don't know me, but, I would like you to
> share all of your secrets about the hardware architecture of the
> R3000 Indigo so that I can try and make a port of NetBSD for it. So,
> should I expect to see that information in my mail in the next few
> days?"

Well, see above. If, OTOH, you can push a few grand over the table to pay for the intellectual property rights research for your doco, they might see things differently. :-)

Have fun,

Gerald