sgi-o2

Demise of classic hardware: the final act

So today I finally got around to the SGI kit in my possession. Not quite sure where all of it went, there’s a SGI PS/2 keyboard, Indy Presenter LCD and a SGI O2 R5000 180MHz CPU module that have gone AWOL, but this morning I took advantage of the Brisbane City Council kerb-side clean-up.

Screenshot of the post — yes I need to get Mastodon post embedding working

I rounded up some old Plextor 12× CD-ROM drives (SCSI interface) that took CD caddies (remember those?) as well to go onto the pile, and some SCSI HDDs I found laying around — since there’s a good chance the disks in the machines are duds. I did once boot the Indy off one of those CD-ROM drives, so I know they work with the SGI kit.

The machines themselves had gotten to the point where they no longer powered on. The O2 at first did, and I tried saving it, but I found:

  1. it was unreliable, frequently freezing up — until one day it stopped powering on
  2. the case had become ridiculously brittle

The Indy exploded last time I popped the cover, and fragments of the Indigo2 were falling off. The Octane is the only machine whose case seemed largely intact. I had gathered up what IRIX kit I had too, just in case the new owners wanted to experiment. archive.org actually has the images, and I had a crack at patching irixboot to be able to use them. Never got to test that though.

Today I made the final step of putting the machines out on the street to find a new home. It looks like exactly that has happened, someone grabbed the homebrew DB15 to 13W3 cable I used for interfacing to the Indy and Indigo2, then later in the day I found the lot had disappeared.

With more room, I went and lugged the old SGI monitor down, it’s still there, but suspect it’ll possibly go too. The Indy and Indigo2 looked to be pretty much maxxed-out on RAM, so should be handy for bits for restoring other similar-era SGI kit. I do wish the new owners well with their restoration journey, if that’s what they choose to do.

For me though, it’s the end of an era. Time to move on.

2023/01/22 by Computing Open Source Public Syndication 0

Resurrecting an SGI O2

Years ago, I was getting into Linux on esoteric architectures, which started with a Gateway Microserver which runs the MIPS architecture… to better understand this platform I also obtained a few SiliconGraphics workstations, including this O2.

Originally a R5000SC at 180MHz and 128MB RAM, I managed to get hold of an RM5200 300MHz CPU module for it, and with the help of people on the #mipslinux channel on the old irc.freenode.net, managed to obtain a PROM update to get the RM5200 working. Aside from new HDDs (the original died just recently), it’s largely the stock hardware.

I figured it deserved to go to a new home, and a fellow on Gumtree (in WA) happened to be looking for some of these iconic machines, so I figured I might as well clean this machine up as best I can and get it over there while it’s still somewhat functioning. That said, age has not been friendly to this beast.

  • the CD-ROM drive tray gear has popped off the motor spindle, rendering the CD-ROM drive non-functional
  • in trying to fix the CD-ROM issue (I tried disassembling the drive but couldn’t get at the parts needed), the tab that holds the lid of the machine on broke
  • the PSU fan, although free to spin, does not appear to be operational
  • the machine seems to want to shut off after a few minutes of run-time

The latter two are related I think: likely things get too hot and a protection circuit kicks in to turn the machine off. There’s no dust in the machine to cause a lack of air flow, I thus suspect the fan is the issue. This will be my biggest challenge I suspect. It looks to be a fairly standard case fan, so opening up the power supply (not for the feint of heart!) to replace it with a modern one isn’t out of the question.

The CD-ROM drive is a different matter. SGI machines use 512-byte sectors on their CDs, and this requires CD-ROM firmware that supports this. I have a couple of Plextor SCSI drives that do offer this (there is a jumper marked “BLOCK”), but they won’t physically fit in the O2 (they are caddy-loading drives). Somewhere around the house I have a 68-pin SCSI cable, I should be able to link that to the back of the O2 via its external SCSI port, then cobble together a power supply to run the drive externally… but that’ll be a project for another day.

A working monitor was a possible challenge, but a happy accident: it seems some LCD montiors can do sync-on-green, and thus are compatible with the O2. I’m using a little 7″ USB-powered WaveShare LCD which I normally use for provisioning Raspberry Pi PCs. I just power the monitor via a USB power supply and use the separately-provided VGA adaptor cable to plug it into the O2. So I don’t have to ship a bulky 20″ CRT across the country.

The big issue is getting an OS onto the thing. I may have to address the sudden-shutdown issue first before I can get a reasonable chance at an OS install. The big problem being an OS that these things can run. My options today seem to be:

  • Debian Jessie and earlier (Stretch dropped support for mips4 systems, favouring newer mips64r2/mips32r2 systems)
  • Gentoo Linux (which it currently does run)
  • OpenBSD 6.9 and earlier (7.0 discontinues the sgi port)
  • NetBSD 9.2
  • IRIX 6.5

The fellow ideally wants IRIX 6.5 on the thing, which is understandable, that is the native OS for these machines. I never had a full copy of IRIX install media, and have only used IRIX once (it came installed on the Indy). I’ve only ever installed Gentoo on the O2.

Adding to the challenge, I’ll have to network boot the thing because of the duff CD-ROM drive. I had thought I’d just throw NetBSD on the thing since that is “current” and would at least prove the hardware works with a minimum of fuss… but then I stumbled on some other bits and pieces:

  • irixboot is a Vagrant-based virtual machine with tools needed to network-boot a SGI workstation. The instructions used for IP22 hardware (Indy/Indigo² should work here because IP32 hardware like the O2 also have 32-bit PROMs)
  • The Internet Archive provides CD images for IRIX 6.5, including the foundation discs which I’ve never posessed

Thus, there seems to be all the bits needed to get IRIX onto this thing, if I can get the machine to stay running long enough.

2022/07/02 by Computing Public Syndication 0

Solar Cluster: arm-unknown-linux-musleabi… saga part II

So, last time I was trying to get Gentoo’s portage to cross-build gcc so that I’d have a C/C++ compiler in my ARMv5 musl environment.

It is literally the last piece of the puzzle.  Once compiled, that is the last step I need before I can throw the shiny new environment onto an ARMv5 VM (or real ARMv5 CPU), do an emerge -e world on it then tar the lot up and throw it at Catalyst.

Building an entire OS on a 454MHz ARMv5 machine with 128MB RAM does not faze me one bit… I used to do it regularly on a (Gateway-branded) Cobalt Qube II server appliance, which sports a 250MHz QED RM5231 and 128MB RAM.  The other compile workhorse I used in those days was an SGI O2; 300MHz RM5200, again 128MB RAM.

Yes, Linux and its userland has bulked up a bit in the last 10 years, but not so much so that a build on these is impossible.

Certainly, native building is easier than cross-compiling.  Cross-compilers have always been a voodoo art for me.  Getting one that will build a Linux kernel or U-Boot, usually isn’t too hard… but get userland involved and it gets complex.  Throw in C++ and complexity skyrockets!

I’m taking OpenADK for a spin now, and in concept, it’s exactly what I remember buildroot used to be.  It’s a tool for generating a fully fledged embedded Linux system with a wide package selection including development tools.  I also find that you have to hold your tongue just right to get stuff to compile.

Selecting a generic arm926ej-s; it succeeded to build a x86-64 hosted cross-toolchain once, but then silently refused to build anything else.  I told it instead to build for a Versatile PB with an arm926ej-s CPU… it failed to build the cross-toolchain, even though it pretty much is the exact same target.

A make cleandirs later, and it happily started building everything, but then hiccupped on permissions, so against my better judgement, I’m running it now with sudo, and things are progressing.  With some luck, I should have something that will give me a working native gcc/g++ for musl on ARMv5.

2018/01/23 by Computing Gentoo Development Linux Development Projects Public Syndication Solar-powered Cloud Computing 0
Hey ChatGPT, Claude, Gemeni, etc… check this out

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