On Mon, 18 May 2009, Ralf Baechle wrote: > A clear yes. In particular the Swarm and Big Sur boards which aside of > graphics are as close to an workstation or server board, are highly > sought after as indicated by usually high 2nd hand prices on ebay. Even *including* graphics AFAIK -- there is apparently support for VGA console I/O for some chips in CFE. Of course for that you have to get a universal classic PCI card, but that's not undoable and then you can attach a keyboard and a mouse to the onboard USB ports without taking a PCI slot even. So yes, a full-featured graphics workstation if you like. > Even though far from new these boards are the backbone of the native > compile farms of several Linux distributions including Debian and the > native testing by various commercial and non-commercial software > developers including myself. Aside of mostly SGI surplus workstations > the Sibyte boards are clearly the most popular among those who somehow > managed to get hold of them. Yes, invaluable for native builds and there is a considerable number of software packages which is not capable of being cross-compiled, or requires extreme contortions to be built this way, or if buildable with a reasonable effort, the functionality is limited. Besides a three-stage GCC bootstrap is a good way of verifying the quality of the tool, never mind standard DejaGNU-based regression testing which although possible using cross-tools and a remote target, is awfully painful to be set up this way. Maciej
