| 1 | | Add support for Sgi Octane (mips64 big-endian). |
| | 1 | Implement support for Sgi Octane machines (mips64 big-endian architecture). |
| | 2 | |
| | 3 | Details:: |
| | 4 | The Octane is a SMP machine built by Sgi in the 1997 - 2000 time frame and it is based on the MIPS R12000 CPU and a proprietary Crossbow ASIC crossbar switch instead of a system bus. It uses the ARCS boot firmware and originally runs with Sgi IRIX. The goal of this ticket is to implement at least a basic kernel functionality, i.e. support for booting, memory management, SMP, framebuffer output and keyboard input. |
| | 5 | |
| | 6 | What Gains and Benefits will this bring?:: |
| | 7 | Sgi Octane is an excellently engineered workstation with 64bit MIPS CPUs, SMP support and some state-of-the-art hardware components (even after 10 years). Implementing HelenOS support for Octane will hint any possible portability issues in HelenOS. |
| | 8 | |
| | 9 | Difficulty:: |
| | 10 | high |
| | 11 | |
| | 12 | Required skills:: |
| | 13 | Since there is very little publicly available hardware documentation of the Sgi Octane (except the CPU itself and other discrete components), the HelenOS supports needs to be largely based on the reverse-engineered code in [http://www.linux-mips.org/~skylark/ Linux] and [http://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html OpenBSD]. Therefore a successful applicant will need to have very good skills in programming in the C language and the ability to learn and reuse know-how contained in reverse-engineered code of other operating system projects. |
| | 14 | |
| | 15 | Documentation:: |
| | 16 | |
| | 17 | * [http://www.linux-mips.org/~skylark/ Linux Sgi Octane port] |
| | 18 | * [http://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html OpenBSD Sgi Octane port] |
| | 19 | |
| | 20 | Possible mentors:: |
| | 21 | HelenOS Core Team, Martin Decky |
