Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2012 00:21:54 -0700 From: Juli Mallett <juli@clockworksquid.com> To: "freebsd-mips@FreeBSD.org" <freebsd-mips@freebsd.org> Subject: Anyone in need of FreeBSD-supported MIPS hardware? Message-ID: <CACVs6=-%2BKxHpr2M4cdccE-hREXWrT-pc6mtFkUBUjxR=VFO_OA@mail.gmail.com>
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I have a large number of MIPS boards / systems that I'd like to make available to interested developers who have clear goals for which hardware would be useful. I have some small and cheap RouterBoard and RouterStation hardware for someone who's just looking to get their feet wet. I also have a bunch of Octeon hardware from low-end to high-end, mostly Octeon Plus (i.e. CN5xxx-based), but also a couple of Octeon XL boards. All of the Octeon hardware I have is SMP. Some is very esoteric and would require a lot of effort to fully support (but sample Linux code should be available; in one case there is a vendor that is refusing to release GPL'd sources, which I may ask the FSF for help with.) I have a large number of Radisys ATCA-7220 boards which are varying degrees of functional. These consist of an e500-based LMP running Linux (basically a host/management system), two Octeon CN5860 (16-core, high-end) units, each with 8GB of RAM, connected to a high-end 10GbE switch, with a large number of SFP+ ports, which is capable of acting as an ATCA switch as well. I have two ATCA chassises and can recommend ones that are available cheaply on eBay for someone who is interested in adding something loud and overwrought to their test setup. Each Octeon unit on the Radisys ATCA boards is a PCI target attached to the LMP. I have Octeon evaluation boards which can be used as PCI-X targets or hosts, and a couple of Octeon boards which can be used as PCIe targets or hosts. In PCI target mode, the Octeon system can be booted and debugged by the host and can be used as a programmable, intelligent NIC running FreeBSD or a standalone application. FreeBSD does not support Octeon devices in target mode at present, but it should be easy to do so (both for the host and target), and I can put you in touch with people who have done this before with FreeBSD if you have any questions. Some of the hardware I have can support USB, some can support SATA disks, and some can only support CF. Although the Radisys blades provide a lot of RAM and CPU, to turn them into a MIPS package cluster would require first solving some issues with their networking and second providing network attached storage of some sort. If you're interested, please contact me privately. I would prefer to give hardware only to people who have some idea of what they will work on and who do not currently have any MIPS (or at least not any Octeon, if requesting Octeon hardware) hardware of their own. Also, if someone has 5u of rack space and a bunch of power and extant 10GbE infrastructure, I can provide a 5u ATCA chassis loaded with hardware. I'm sure that would be useful in general for people doing networking work with FreeBSD, as the hardware can very easily be used to do real networking loads at 10GbE line rate, or as a simple traffic generator, but it's also loud and hot and annoying. ATCA is "fun". (If anyone has a spare one of those nice single-slot bench-top ATCA development kit enclosures, please let me know; I would be quite eager to purchase or trade for it, or several if possible. Or even just a non-finicky single-board ATCA bench power supply. "Carrier grade" seems to mean that the tools involved are so complex and numerous that several people need to be employed full-time to keep the thing running. I digress.) If you're interested in just a small project, too, I'm happy to ship hardware out for a brief duration and receive it back. The Octeon stuff is generally kind-of fun because of all the interesting offload stuff it has. Why not add software RAID offload support to FreeBSD, or create infrastructure for compression offload in the kernel to go with our crypto offload? I had a lot of fun working on using Octeon's SHA offload to do BitCoin mining, and that's the sort of thing that can even be done over SSH as a regular user. Anyway, I know there's a lot of developers out there interested in FreeBSD on MIPS, and I'd love to help any and all get started. Thanks, Juli.
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