OpenBSD ports to SGI

[Kernel_Killer]

Some might have noticed Theo de Raadt's constant posts about needed SGI hardware, mainly rackmountables, floating across various message board earlier this year. The reason behind it all, was to develop a MIPS port for OpenBSD, in hopes to find and fix new bugs.

Theo Explains:

"Why add a new architecture? SGI's mips machines are dead, aren't they? Well our expierence has been that every architecture we add has helped us find bugs in shared code that affects other architectures. [...] Some very scary and major bugs have been dredged out almost automatically. In some cases, the effort is not worthwhile. In this case, I judge it to be valuable. In particular, the SGI developer will probably peek out quite a few busdma bugs, which will affect driver support on any busdma architecture."

These Busdma APIs, derived from NetBSD (bus_dma), reduce the need for various devices when porting to a different platform adding to the portability.

Original Article