SGI Altix 350 milestone: installable image!

[Marcel Moolenaar]

All,

With great pleasure and a little bit of pride in managing to figure this
platform out, I can announce that we've reached a very good first milestone:

We can install FreeBSD on an SGI Altix 350.

Use the following daily to start playing with it:
https://pub.allbsd.org/FreeBSD-snapshots/ia64-ia64/10.0-projects_altix2-r245399-JPSNAP/iso/

Thanks Sato-san for making the dailies on the Altix branch!

Of course there are gotchas and loose ends, etc. These are:
1.  If your disk doesn't have an EFI partition, make sure to create one
    by aligning the partition to track boundaries. Otherwise EFI won't
    mount the FAT32 in it. The best way to do that is to enter the shell
    and create the partition before starting the install.
2.  The Broadcom network interace does *NOT* work at this time, because
    it still needs to be ported to the new busdma/mi framework. Thus, if
    you install FreeBSD you won't have networking just yet. You can do a
    buildworld though :-)
3.  I haven't actually run in multi-user on multiple nodes. The global
    TLB shootdown is not propagated across nodes just yet, so expect big
    problems if you try this on a multi-node system. Limit your testing
    to a single node for now.

I'll be working on bge(4) first. This should make the Altix into a fully
functional machine. After that I'll expand to multiple nodes. This is
where the real fun is with respect to NUMA support in FreeBSD.

Have fun and let me know how things go. This platform isn't without its
quirks. All I know is that it works for me :-)

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
marcel at xcllnt.net