Subject: hardware questions

From: "Mark and Janice Juszczec" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 16:20:42 +0000

Hi folks

I'm the guy with the Helio pda running an r3912 chip.  In an effort to 
create a better development environment, I'm thinking about puchasing a 
Silicon Graphics Iris Indigo Workstation.

But, I'm unfamiliar with MIPS hardware.

First of all, will code developed on this machine run on the r3912 chip?  
The r3912 is little endian mips, 16 bit I think but maybe 32 bit.

Can off the shelf monitors, keyboards, hard drives, NICs and memory be 
installed in this system?

Mark

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From: Geert Uytterhoeven <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 18:26:17 +0100 (MET)

> The r3912 is little endian mips, 16 bit I think but maybe 32 bit.

SGI workstations are big endian, while WinCE hardware is always little endian.
So you still have to cross-compile if you want to use the SGI as a development
environment.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [email-masked]

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds

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From: "Kevin D. Kissell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 12:39:02 +0100

As Geert pointed out, the big-endian SGI hardware configuration
and the little-endian PDA configuration mean that you'll be cross-compiling
for "mipsel" (MIPS endian-little) on the Indigo anyway.  SGI did
use industry-standard monitors, keyboards, and disks units of the
period (which was 10 years ago - they could be hard to find today), 
but used non-standard NIC and memory cards. You're probably better 
off using a Linux PC as your development host.