A yak shave with SGI's EFS
blog.pizzabox.computer
A yak shave with SGI's EFS
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS
#2Very fun read. There is something really enjoyable about stories of people solving the problem at hand in the most straightforward way possible, even when that means digging into all kinds of low-level details that are usually abstracted away for us.
Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS
#3Good to see some folks using my 'irixboot' utility in the wild. Looks like it worked!
Also, the whole process by which the Development CD image is extracted could have been easily handled by irixboot and you can use irixboot as a 'dist' install source within the already-installed OS.
Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS
#4Not too bad. I was expecting the first shaving step to be about the OS media requiring 520 byte sectors and thus needing a "fancier" CD writer/reader. Maybe that was Sun, not SGI?
Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS
#5Not too bad. I was expecting the first shaving step to be about the OS media requiring 520 byte sectors and thus needing a "fancier" CD writer/reader. Maybe that was Sun, not SGI?
You might be thinking of OS/400 aka IBM i, which indeed uses 520 byte sectors. Sun used 512.
Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS
#6Not too bad. I was expecting the first shaving step to be about the OS media requiring 520 byte sectors and thus needing a "fancier" CD writer/reader. Maybe that was Sun, not SGI?
I think the whole 512 byte sector CD-ROM thing was common to all the 90's-era "Real UNIX" machines. They generally all wanted to treat CDs like a hard drive, for booting purposes. (PCs, on the other hand, did a different weird hack where they'd embed a floppy image at the state of the CD and the BIOS knew how to handle that.)
Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS
#7Not too bad. I was expecting the first shaving step to be about the OS media requiring 520 byte sectors and thus needing a "fancier" CD writer/reader. Maybe that was Sun, not SGI?
I think the whole 512 byte sector CD-ROM thing was common to all the 90's-era "Real UNIX" machines. They generally all wanted to treat CDs like a hard drive, for booting purposes. (PCs, on the other hand, did a different weird hack where they'd embed a floppy image at the state of the CD and the BIOS knew how to handle that.)
Yeah, you're right, they wanted 512 instead of 2048 bytes per sector to use the CD as a HD. But I think that at least one of the Unix vendors shipped the install media as 520 byte sectors, with 512 bytes of data and 8 bytes of checksum. In order to duplicate the discs, you needed to own a writer that was fancier than average (i.e. a SCSI unit, not an IDE one).
Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS
#8Not too bad. I was expecting the first shaving step to be about the OS media requiring 520 byte sectors and thus needing a "fancier" CD writer/reader. Maybe that was Sun, not SGI?
You might be thinking of OS/400 aka IBM i, which indeed uses 520 byte sectors. Sun used 512.
Yeah, I know about OS/400 using the extra bytes on hard drives for the pointer tags (not a checksum), but what I had in mind were data CDs, whose canonical sector size was 2048.
Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS
#9A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they were a highway robbery back then).
There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at all. Now I know why we kept only O2s on desktops and Octanes were in 'server room' when we did work on them.
Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS
#10A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they were a highway robbery back then). There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at…
On the bright side, the Octane2 is one of the few SGI machines new enough to support graphics hardware with DVI ports.