Opened 16 years ago

Last modified 8 years ago

#40 new enhancement

Implement support for Sgi Octane (mips64)

Reported by: Martin Decky Owned by: Martin Decky
Priority: minor Milestone:
Component: helenos/kernel/mips64 Version:
Keywords: gsoc11, gsoc12, gsoc13, gsoc14, gsoc15, gsoc16, gsoc17 Cc:
Blocker for: Depends on:
See also:

Description (last modified by Martin Decky)

Implement support for Sgi Octane machines (mips64 big-endian architecture).

Details
The Octane is a SMP machine built by Sgi in the 1997 - 2000 time frame. 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 support for Sgi Octane (basic kernel functionality), i.e. support for booting, memory management, SMP, framebuffer output and keyboard input.
What Gains and Benefits will this bring?
Sgi Octane is an excellently engineered workstation with 64bit MIPS CPUs, SMP support and interesting hardware design that is inspiring even after many years. Implementing HelenOS support for Octane should hint any possible portability issues in HelenOS and it should also improve some minor functionality aspects of the kernel.
Difficulty
Very high
Required skills
Since there is very little publicly available hardware documentation of the Sgi Octane (except the CPU itself and other discrete components), the HelenOS support needs to be largely based on the reverse-engineered code in Linux and 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.
Note
We have a single Sgi Octane machine physically available for development, debugging and testing.
Documentation
Possible mentors
HelenOS Core Team, Martin Decky

Change History (14)

comment:1 by Jakub Jermář, 15 years ago

Component: unspecified
Keywords: suggestion added

comment:2 by Martin Decky, 14 years ago

Description: modified (diff)
Keywords: gsoc11 added; suggestion removed
Milestone: 0.5.0
Summary: Add support for Sgi Octane (mips64)Implement support for Sgi Octane (mips64)
Version: mainline

comment:3 by Jakub Jermář, 14 years ago

Component: unspecifiedkernel/mips64

comment:4 by Martin Decky, 14 years ago

Description: modified (diff)

comment:5 by Jakub Jermář, 13 years ago

Keywords: gsoc12 added

comment:6 by Jakub Jermář, 13 years ago

Milestone: 0.5.00.5.1

comment:7 by Jakub Jermář, 12 years ago

Keywords: gsoc13 added

comment:8 by Martin Decky, 12 years ago

Description: modified (diff)

comment:9 by Vojtech Horky, 11 years ago

Keywords: gsoc14 added

comment:10 by Martin Decky, 11 years ago

Description: modified (diff)

comment:11 by Jakub Jermář, 10 years ago

Milestone: 0.5.10.5.2

comment:12 by Jakub Jermář, 10 years ago

Keywords: gsoc15 added

comment:13 by Jakub Jermář, 9 years ago

Keywords: gsoc16 added

comment:14 by Jakub Jermář, 8 years ago

Milestone: 0.6.1
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