[9fans] MIPS Support in Release 4

[Geoff Collyer]

SGIs are MIPS machines (except perhaps the earliest ones, but the 4Ds
are MIPS). There were ports to one of the SGI Challenge machines and
I believe the Indy or Indigo. I can't recall if these were ever
distributed, and kittens are destroying my office, so I'm not going to
spend the time to find out. Anyway, 4e doesn't include any SGI ports
and SGI never made it easy to get the sort of information (e.g.,
physical memory map, MMU details) that you'd need to port to their
machines, and I think there was quite a bit of variation, though
probably not as much as across Sun's product line, where it seemed
that every new model had a new incompatible MMU. For terminals, the
frame buffers seemed to all be different and incompatible.

[rob pike, esq.]

Geoff is right. Despite repeated requests by a number of people,
SGI has never given us the right to distribute our kernel source
for their machines under an open source agreement.

-rob

[Jim Meier]

That's too bad. Is there any way to obtain a binary-only kernel? Perhaps
one from an older release?

-Jim

[Jim Meier]

On Fri, 28 Jun 2002 08:04:36 -0600, rob pike, esq. wrote:

That's too bad. Is there a binary-only kernel available? I assume it
would have to be purchased, if it is even available..

-Jim

[rob pike, esq.]

> That's too bad. Is there any way to obtain a binary-only kernel? Perhaps
> one from an older release?

The release terms would need to be negotiated, it probably wouldn't run
on your hardware, and since it would be from an ancient version of the
kernel - the only SGI machine we still have is a hulking Challenge - many
binaries wouldn't work properly. ls, for one.

I've spent too much time trying to get SGI to let us spring our kernel loose.
I'm not spending any more.

-rob