On Thu, 22 May 2003 12:45:51 +0100 (BST)
Christian Smith <csmith@micromuse.com> wrote:

> By the inability to read the MAC address from sq0, I guess this kernel
> is not ethernet capable, hence my failure to boot with NFS root?

It's certainly ethernet capable, but I mustn't have mentioned the lack
of nvram support and its ramifications. The ARCS prom SGIs can read the
mac address using arcbios support. The IP12 is not such a machine and
that kernel is from before such a time as I'd written the eeprom
code. I did complete it just last weekend, however. Recent source is
available at:
http://www.cataclysmic.org/sgimips/mips_sgimips-20030518-IP12-IP20.tar.gz
I'll also throw a new IP12 kernel up there
(www.cataclysmic.org/sgimips/) as well as a 1.6T userland build; just
check the dates.

> Has there been any progress recently on this port? I'm itching to get
> my Indigo running NetBSD, but don't fancy trashing my Irix
> installation to make room (could get another disk, I suppose.)

IP12 and IP20 do have some wd33c93 issues as well as a rather
significant seeq bug (or, perhaps a series of bugs) which really hinders
performance and causes hangs on certain nfs operations. If using NFS,
please experiment with the mount_nfs -r and -w options to limit read and
write size. One could include defaults in the kernel with
NFS_RSIZE/NFS_WSIZE, but that's just kludgery. On my IP20 using a
value of 1024 allowed for a full NFS boot. My IP20 also has a
propensity towards segfaulting userland binaries, especially ls. Rafal
has suggested a cache issue, but I'm not qualified to venture a guess.
That issue, along with the aforementioned seeq and scsi bugs are really
the last pieces necessary to achieve indy/indigo^2 level support.

Both systems can boot to a disk-based system, however a bootloader
doesn't exist for IP12. I've heard that the sgi volume header is around
2 megabytes, so one could probably just squeeze a kernel in there pretty
easily. I haven't yet experimented with that. It's certainly no solution
as a very minimal kernel still occupies 1.6 megabytes.

Unforunately, my IP12 just decided to kick the bucket days after the
clock battery on my IP20 gave out and needed replacing. The
IP12-specific support is done, however, and I can continue unabated on
its R4k brother. That said, the latest kernel I've uploaded should work
but I've not tested it.

Cheers,
-Steve