Documentation of Operating Systems and Developers

IRIX

SGI uses the industry standard UNIX to create its own operating system IRIX. Thus a basis for Hightech computing and graphic computing was created. IRIX is compatible with the UNIX system V Release 4 and is compatible to the standard UNIX 95. Therefore it supports among other things POSIX and is year 2000 compatibly. IRIX is used on special workstations by sgi like the Octane, Onyx, Iris and many other systems.

SGI struggled financially as companies like Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM also got active on the market for High performance computing. As a reaction SGI published the end of the product support of IRIX and MIPS systems for the 2006-12-29. Furthermore SGI wants to grant support for customers about additional agreements until December 2013. The reorientation concentrates on Itanium servers and workstation systems of the Altix line with the Linux operating system.

Field of Application
- From workstations up to supercomputers
- Visualization
- Simulation
- Film animations
- Natural science

System Environment
- only for MIPS/SGI systems
- scalable up to 512 CPUs and 1 TByte of RAM in one system
- 16 GByte RAM
- 64-Bit, 32-Bit on older systems
- XFS file system
- 4dwm window manager
- Supports the EFS, HFS and FAT file system
- GUI was named IRIX Interactive Desktop

IRIX 6.1

This new version is based on the 64-bit operating system IRIX 6.0.1 and is downward compatible. It unfolded his full performance on R8000 chip sets with 6 operations per processor cycle, 64-bit processing and compatibility to older 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS processors.

Functions:
- 64-bit virtual address space of 1 TByte for each 64-bit user process (R8000)
- Large physical memory of 16 GByte (R8000)
- Large file size of 1 TByte at first release (R8000)
- Large file system size of 1 TByte at first release (R8000)
- Millions of files per directory (R8000)
- Supports up to 18 R8000 processors per POWER CHALLENGE or POWER Onyx system
- New XFS file system for high-performance
- New N32 software developers kit
- New networking and system administration features (based on IRIX 5.3)
- POSIX 1003.1 Specification
- Complies with the X/Open Portability Guide, Issue 3 (XPG3), including support for I18N and L10N
- Nearly all binaries built on IRIX 5 can be run under IRIX 6
- Network: 64-bit NFSv3 for faster data transfers and distributed 64-bit addressing
- Network: Parallel TCP/IPx for higher parallel networking throughput
- Network: IRIXpro(TM)
- Network: Performance CoPilot(TM)

Support on the systems:
- POWER CHALLENGE, POWER Onyx, POWER Indigo2 and other recent Silicon Graphics systems

IRIX 6.2

Functions:
- Advanced 3D Internet/multimedia user and developer desktop environment
- 1 TB virtual memory addressing, 9 TB files, 18 TB partitions on 64-bit platforms
- 32-bit ABI compatibility with IRIX 5 applications, recompile for full performance on R4x00/R5000/R8000/R10000 systems
- Complete software environment for industry-leading graphics workstations and high-performance supercomputer, database, and network servers
- X/Open Base 95 Profile branding from the X/Open Company Ltd.
- POSIX 1003.1 certification
- Supported filesystems are EFS, XFS, Network Filesystem (NFS), ISO 9660 (CDFS), DOS (floppy only), swap, /proc Filesystem

Support on the systems:
- Crimson, Indy, Indigo R4000, Indigo2, POWER Indigo2, Onyx, POWER Onyx, Challenge, POWER CHALLENGE

IRIX 6.5.30 was the last released version from SGI. The extended support was discontinued in 2013. No further updates were released.

6.5 - Irix Desktop with tools for the administration	6.5 - running graphic Demos	6.5 - file manager with graphical restriction setup	6.5 - OpenSource software Gimp 1.2 and bluefish pre0.7 on the run
6.5 - Internet browser Netscape	6.5 - bash Shell with programs hinv, gfxinfo and esdreprt

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