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OpenBSD on SGI: A Rollercoaster Story (online.fr)
82 points by brynet 1 day ago | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments
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That was a pretty epic story. I'll admit that I skimmed a few parts. :)

Sad that it's discontinued, but mostly it's remarkable that so much was done by so few people.


Very interesting story.

I used to regularly visit SGI documentation due to OpenGL/IrisGL, Inventor, and the original HP STL C++ documentation that SGI hosted, and naturally dive into Irix documentation in boring days.


I wish it was still supported, but I'm sure I was one of very few that was actually using it! Even then it was just for fun.

As I understand it, Loongson is very close to MIPS. I think I remember reading that just 4 patented instructions were removed from the MIPS ISA, and I am not even sure that they were replaced.

If so, that means that new MIPS-family hardware is being made today. And ISTM that represents a new target market or audience for this.


AFAIK Loongson is dead and isn't made anymore, and unlike OpenBSD/sgi, Loongson was a little-endian arch. OpenBSD/octeon is a closer match, but also dead as CAVIUM switched to making ARM CPUs.

LoongArch isn't MIPS compatible. OpenBSD doesn't support it.


There is someone on GitHub who's been trying to keep OpenBSD/sgi alive out-of-tree using bits and pieces (e.g: userland binaries) of OpenBSD/octeon, which remains supported.

https://github.com/the-machine-hall/openbsd-sgi


Thanks, that looks promising!



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