From owner-freebsd-hardware Fri Apr 23 23:20: 0 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from panzer.plutotech.com (panzer.plutotech.com [206.168.67.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0BB6E14DDD for ; Fri, 23 Apr 1999 23:19:57 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ken@panzer.plutotech.com) Received: (from ken@localhost) by panzer.plutotech.com (8.9.3/8.8.5) id AAA40194; Sat, 24 Apr 1999 00:17:19 -0600 (MDT) From: "Kenneth D. Merry" Message-Id: <199904240617.AAA40194@panzer.plutotech.com> Subject: Re: SGI 320 In-Reply-To: from Robert Sowders at "Apr 19, 1999 7: 6: 5 pm" To: rsowders@usgs.gov (Robert Sowders) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 00:17:19 -0600 (MDT) Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL43 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org [ You may want to configure your mailer/text editor so your lines are no longer than 80 characters. ] Robert Sowders wrote... > Has anyone looked into getting Freebsd to work on the SGI 320 or 540. This a SGI pc, the bus speeds are impressive. The box was built to run NT and that is all that SGI is looking at right now. I saw a demo of this system by SGI the other day and it is a screamer. All bus speeds are 6 times faster than Intel bus speeds. An efficient OS and this box would make for one impressive server, and cheap too. It almost makes NT look ok. > > I talked to an SGI engineer about their visual workstations a couple of weeks ago. One thing that he told me that isn't explicitly stated in their spec sheets/web pages is that the machine has a unified memory architecture, like the O2, I suppose. That means that the system memory is shared with the graphics subsystem. This would present some challenges for getting the graphics subsystem on those boxes working correctly with XFree86. My guess is that it would require some VM support from FreeBSD, or at the very least a way to configure the kernel to reserve a certain chunk of RAM for the graphics subsystem. Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@plutotech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message