OpenBSD Journal

Hackers in need of hardware

Contributed by weerd on from the mips-r-us dept.

Bret Lambert (blambert@), your friendly OpenBSD hacker in Norway, writes in about some hardware requests that have been added to want.html recently.

The requests focus on (for now) unsupported or partially supported hardware that is under active development. Machines like the Lemote Yeelong, more SGI hardware and USB infrared dongles are being asked for and Bret asked some of his fellow developers why they requested this gear. Please read on for their replies.

Jasper Lievisse-Adriaanse (jasper@) would like a Lemote Yeelong:

The Lemote Yeelong is a netbook containing a 64-bit Loongson-2F MIPS processor. The OpenBSD port to this machine is still very new and more developers having access to this device will ensure it's maturing.

Otto Moerbeek (otto@) was also interested in getting one of these, but he already had his request fulfilled by a kind donor.

Gilles Chehade (gilles@) is interested in getting some IR dongles:

I have a few IR controlled devices and I figured it would be fun to play with them from my OpenBSD laptop. So I ordered this tiny USB IrDA adapter which is not recognized and attaches to ugen.

After looking at the code from umodem(4) and uipaq(4), I decided to try to write a driver for my device, and after a few hours of work I managed to get something working. The driver makes device accessible through the ucom(4) driver which makes it behave like a tty(4).

I would love it if people would send me a few different adapters so that I could improve (and learn more about) my driver.

Miod Vallat (miod@) would like access to some more SGI hardware:

Basically at the moment, we have support for all the high-end sgi hardware (including machines no other free operating system runs on), with the following things missing:

  • SMP, except on Octane. SMP on other platforms coming soon (during the next release cycle, really).
  • frame buffers. jsing@ is working on this but slacking on his current code.
  • the serial ports on Origin 300 (hence the request for one), which prevent the machine to be supported at the moment (it's a headless machine). This is the kind of driver you can't really work on without having physical access to the machine.
  • the ATA part of the IOC4 chip on Origin 350 and Tezro (hence the request for one, since we know Origin 350 works). This is the kind of driver you can't really work on without having physical access to the machine, as well (the initial Origin 350 specific work was written blind in f2k9, and debugged remotely on Theo's machine, and it took about one week to fix the few bugs until interrupts got routed correctly, and I don't really want to live this again).

As for what's been done, very roughly: by 4.6 we had a stabler-than-ever O2 support, and rough Octane, Origin 200 and Fuel support. The intent of the 4.6->4.7 release cycle was to get SMP working on one platform (Octane) and improve hardware support; and indeed, more mips-specific kernel bowels have been cleaned up, to pave the way for future work; hardware support has improved with support of the Origin 350 family, and more bugs have been fixed allowing most of the PCI devices, if not all, to work in these machines (this includes devices with PCI-PCI bridges, and Cardbus bridges, although the latter is not enabled by default).

With this work over, the next release cycle (4.7->4.8) will focus more on SMP and the NUMA aspects of the high end systems: I intend to get SMP working on the remaining models (Origin family), and work on making the kernel aware of the memory physical location and connection, something which will benefit amd64 SMP systems as well. I also am working on extensive changes to the pmap code for these systems, allowing use of much more physical memory than the current limit of a few GB, and extending the userland address space beyond 2GB; the switch from 4KB kernel pages to 16KB on the high end systems, which occured during this release cycle, is one of the preliminary steps of this roadmap.

Helping out is easy - if you are interested in seeing support for the hardware that is needed or you have some suitable gear laying around that is not being used anymore, please contact the developers and help them out. Other hardware requests that can be found on want.html also need your attention, so if you'd like to support development but don't have a Lemote or a nice SGI box but do have some of the other hardware being requested there, simply send the requesting developer an e-mail.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Brynet (Brynet) brynet@gmail.com on

    Looks like some exciting stuff will be happening soon, I expect all of you rich people to start donating.. just to make up for of us broke folk!

  2. By nudzo (nudzo) ivan.nudzik@gmail.com on

    Tips for relatively cheap alternate MIPS 24Kc hardware:
    RouterStation Pro
    RB450G
    More usable seems to be Ubiquity Networks board. They are more 'open' than MikroTik. JATG and USB ports to connect external HDD are benefit too.

    Comments
    1. By Simon Lundström (simmel) on

      > Tips for relatively cheap alternate MIPS 24Kc hardware:
      > RouterStation Pro
      > RB450G
      >
      > More usable seems to be Ubiquity Networks board. They are more 'open' than MikroTik. JATG and USB ports to connect external HDD are benefit too.

      +1!

      RouterStation Pro seems to be the WRAP replacement I "need"... ; P

      If a dev wants this, ask for it because I will send money to get it supported!

      Comments
      1. By Otto Moerbeek (otto) on http://www.drijf.net

        > > Tips for relatively cheap alternate MIPS 24Kc hardware:
        > > RouterStation Pro
        > > RB450G
        > >
        > > More usable seems to be Ubiquity Networks board. They are more 'open' than MikroTik. JATG and USB ports to connect external HDD are benefit too.
        >
        > +1!
        >
        > RouterStation Pro seems to be the WRAP replacement I "need"... ; P
        >
        > If a dev wants this, ask for it because I will send money to get it supported!

        To me it is not clear from the description if the RB PRO has its ethernet ports configured as separate ports or as a hardware switched ports. The latter would make it less interesting.

        Comments
        1. By Otto Moerbeek (otto) on http://www.drijf.net

          > > > Tips for relatively cheap alternate MIPS 24Kc hardware:
          > > > RouterStation Pro
          > > > RB450G
          > > >
          > > > More usable seems to be Ubiquity Networks board. They are more 'open' than MikroTik. JATG and USB ports to connect external HDD are benefit too.
          > >
          > > +1!
          > >
          > > RouterStation Pro seems to be the WRAP replacement I "need"... ; P
          > >
          > > If a dev wants this, ask for it because I will send money to get it supported!
          >
          > To me it is not clear from the description if the RB PRO has its ethernet ports configured as separate ports or as a hardware switched ports. The latter would make it less interesting.

          And what's more important, they seem to be 32-bit only, which means that our current mips64 port has no chances to run on it.

          Comments
          1. By nudzo (nudzo) on

            Otto, you are right. These are a MIPS32 platforms. Both are based on Atheros AR7100 Product Family.
            SoC holds two 10/100/1000 ethernet MACs, so at least one ethernet is on switch.

            Comments
            1. By Anonymous Coward (anon) on

              > Otto, you are right. These are a MIPS32 platforms. Both are based on Atheros AR7100 Product Family.SoC holds two 10/100/1000 ethernet MACs, so at least one ethernet is on switch.

              The switches on these two (and also the similar Unex boards) are vlan-capable, so the ports can have traffic directed at them individually, but if you were expecting 5x1Gb throughput you're out of luck. (Actually Mikrotik are talking about a maximum of 70kpps so with 1500 MTU you won't be getting 2x1Gb either).

  3. By David Gwynne (dlg) dlg@openbsd.org on

    bret is friendly?

    Comments
    1. By Paul Irofti (bulibuta) on gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/1/users/bulibuta

      > bret is friendly?

      No, but he twisted weerd's arm to say so.

    2. By Bret Lambert (tbert) on

      > bret is friendly?

      A little *too* friendly, according to the restraining order.

      Man, who would've thought clowns wouldn't have a sense of humor?

      Comments
      1. By Gilles Chehade (gilles) gilles@openbsd.org on http://www.poolp.org/

        > > bret is friendly?
        >
        > A little *too* friendly, according to the restraining order.
        >
        > Man, who would've thought clowns wouldn't have a sense of humor?

        A little *too* friendly and little *sick* too ;-)

  4. By Anonymous Coward (nudzo) ivan.nudzik@gmail.com on

    What a beast - 16 core MIPS64: The Revolution x16 Server
    Time to forget SGI hw and move to Octeon net CPUs... ;-) But it seems to be expensive device.

    Comments
    1. By Otto Moerbeek (otto) on http://www.drijf.net

      > What a beast - 16 core MIPS64: The Revolution x16 Server
      > Time to forget SGI hw and move to Octeon net CPUs... ;-) But it seems to be expensive device.

      Miod nevere forgets.

    2. By David Gwynne (dlg) on

      > What a beast - 16 core MIPS64: The Revolution x16 Server
      > Time to forget SGI hw and move to Octeon net CPUs... ;-) But it seems to be expensive device.

      i want one. ive been looking for a nas box and this has a great disk controller.

      Comments
      1. By Gilles Chehade (gilles) on http://www.poolp.org/~gilles/

        > > What a beast - 16 core MIPS64: The Revolution x16 Server
        > > Time to forget SGI hw and move to Octeon net CPUs... ;-) But it seems to be expensive device.
        >
        > i want one. ive been looking for a nas box and this has a great disk controller.

        I want one too :-)

  5. By Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse (jasper) jasper@openbsd.org on http://humppa.nl

    Many thanks to the two donors who sponsored my Lemote! The mailman just delivered it ;-)

  6. By nudzo (nudzo) ivan.nudzik@gmail.com on

    Yet another MIPS64 hw... I checked RMI website after long time.
    They have many evaluation boards, but the most interesting seems to be PCIX-I Evaluation Card. It is a 8-core, 4 threads per core XLR532 based PCI-X card. If I understood it right, it should work like - crosscompile on any x86 server (with PCI-X) and then load it on MIPS64 based board for testing/debugging. SoC has 4x GBit and hw crypto engines on die with total 10Gbit bulk crypto throughput. Great performance.
    These chips are used along with Octeon ones in AMC telecom boards as a crypto devices. I've worked on SW for MME node (LTE) and these AMC crypto boards were required to handle 11.000 IPSec sessions from eNodeB (BTS replacement in LTE).
    Another one board LiTEXLS408. 2-core MIPS64, hw crypto, 8x GBit ports a.s.o. Simply toy for home. ;-)

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