On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, Gerald Heinig wrote:

>No. NetBSD-sgimips only works on Indy machines upwards IIRC (check the port page). Netbooting works fine in itself. You
>just don't have a kernel to boot on an Indigo.

Actually it only works on r5k O2s with a very specific hardware
configuration.  It's a very spartan port at this point.  The press what
went out after the first commits to syssrc/arch/sgimips were, IMO, a bit
premature and overrated.  This port is nowhere near being ready for
everyday use.  Your best bet is to stick around on this list and listen
for announcements as they come along, it's a fairly low-traffic list.

>Depends whether you want to run *anything* on your machine, or specifically NetBSD. For the former, try Ebay and search
>for 'SGI'. There's a guy there who regularly auctions off SGI software. You can almost certainly run Irix 5.3 on your
>box and quite possibly Irix 6.2 as well, but check that! (on the comp.sys.sgi.* newsgroup).

Irix 5.3 is the last version of IRIX to support the r3k, so you'll be
stuck with that.  6.x supports r4k Indigo's and up.

>I'm trying to get info from SGI to try a port to the Indigo R4000, but I'm not having much luck at the moment. It seems
>they only kept info for the Indy and deleted all the older stuff.

Well, the r4k Indigo has remarkably standard parts in it.  You should be
able to port existing drivers for the ethernet and scsi and once those
are up you're good to go.  The mips port already has r4k support in the
tree and you should be able to use the ARCS console.  It shouldn't be
that difficult a port.  I just don't have time to even think about it.

-- 
Brandon D. Valentine <bandix@looksharp.net>
"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a
good example."  --  Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson