GNU/Linux on the SGI Origin 200 (ip27)

I spent a couple of months on an SGI internship trying to polish Linux's rather flakey Origin 200 support. Here are some of my contributions.

• LINUX-IP27-HOWTO is a document describing how to install Debian GNU/Linux on the Origin 200.
• gen-mips-cd is a shell script (that uses the next 2 items) for creating bootable Debian GNU/Linux CDs for the Origin 200.
• fblocks.c is a program that is useful for anyone using Linux. (Not just Origin 200 users). It lists the blocks used by a particular file, in order.
• genisovh.diff is a patch to genisovh to add support for embedded partitions (not just files) in ISO images.
• kernel-ip27-config is the Linux 2.4.x kernel configuration I used. It includes support for many CDROM drives, which should be useful for installation via CDROM.
• strace-sigaction.patch is a patch to fix strace(1). It's sigaction(2) parsing code was totally broken.
• busybox-init-path.diff and busybox-init-serial.diff are some show-stopper bug-fixes.
• mips-cmdline.patch is a patch to clean up Linux's MIPS command line parser.
• Some miscellaneous kernel bugs I hunted down and semi-fixed. In most cases, other people provided better patches. I'm just mentioning them because hunting down these bugs is an incredible amount of work... about 2 days on average.
  • ip27-cache.diff is a patch to add a cache-flush handler! How cool are MIPS and Linux... this patch wasn't needed for so long because Linux hardly ever needs to flush the cache!!! (When this was attempted, the box locked up cold)
  • ip27-timer-irq.patch is a patch that makes the timer interrupt interface a bit better with Linux's bureaucracy. Some odd things were happening.
  • ramdisk-memcheck.patch is a patch to remove a bogus check, that broke the ramdisk support (which is required for the Debian installer bootstrap process).

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