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A Paper on IRIX Binary Compatibility in NetBSD

Posted by timothy on from the so-things-fit-together dept.

jschauma writes "'IRIX Binary Compatibility', the first paper of a series on IRIX binary compatibility on NetBSD by Emmanuel Dreyfus has been published by ONLamp.com. The paper goes into the details of the implementation in the NetBSD kernel. As it explains how things are implemented, the paper documents various kernel susbsystems and reverse engineering techniques."

1 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. maybe by leastsquares · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sure this is really cool, but does anyone actually need it?

    I still occassionally have to use SGI hardware, but that's only to run legacy software. Okay, so at first glance this might be useful. Unfotunately (to the best of my knowledge) you can't get the hardware without IRIX. So why not just stick with that?

    I won't believe for a second that NetBSD performs as well on that hardware as IRIX does (assuming that NetBSD is compiled with gcc, and with the performance difference I see between the MIPSPro compiler vs. gcc on MIPS CPUs with my code).

    Please tell me I'm completely wrong.

    This does look really cool though -- maybe the basis of an IRIX emulator? I'd love to ditch those ugly SGI boxes ;)