Subject: SGI ARC .vs. ACE ARC BIOS

From: "Alec Voropay" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 18:11:12 +0400

Hi!

 Can anyone explain a difference between SGI ARC BOOT-PROM
(sometimes called ARCS) and an old ACE ARC BIOS (Jazz/Magnum) ?
Is this equal (in functionality, not command line) ?

P.S.
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/Hardware/Machines/ARC/

--
-=AV=-

---

From: Ralf Baechle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 02:50:23 +0200

> http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/Hardware/Machines/ARC/

ARC is a dead-born standard that standardizes both hardware and firmware.
All implementations violate it more or less.  The whole thing was
originally part of the ACE initiative, which also has developped the
Jazz design to which the Magnum, Acer and others are more or less related.
As I recall the Manum was some sort of reference implementation.  The
hardware specs were rather fuzzy and more or less obsolete from a UNIX
workstation perspective already ten years ago.  Not considering endianess -
SGI ARC(S) is big endian, other firmware is little endian - and for the
little ARC functionality that Linux is using the two can be considered
equivalent.

  Ralf