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A Look at IRIX 6.5.17
XFS writes "OSNews got their hands on the latest version of IRIX, 6.5.17 (released in August), and they have published an interesting article about it and they explain why IRIX was and still is, one of the best workstation Unices out there. Especially when it comes to multimedia/GL performance. I hope SGI will do something with IRIX though, as they seem to have let it fall behind and be one of these great technologies that get lost through various corporate focus shifts..."
Heh, heh....I get it!
now they're selling itaniums
site already seems to be down...
Free Mac Mini
its the best- for me to poop on.
Seriously, IRIX is about as stable as Windows 95. Have you ever used it? Or just lusted after the hardware, nerd-boys?
And now we get all these posts from guys who know a bit of Linux who think they know *NIX because they post on slashdot.
That they haven't gone with a Windows XP interface!
Kudos to SGI!
I think it is pretty interesting that the benchmark that they used measured memory throughput of the graphics CPU, as opposed to, say, an actual workload-handling of the OS. In other words, this is a synthetic benchmark, versus a real-world benchmark. They say, "Look! We can do memory transfers really really fast!"
Unfortunately, memory transfers are not the world when it comes to multiprocessor multimedia boxes. The overhead comes in when you're trying to synchronize a large number of threads/CPUs to do a large task. For example, an Oracle database.
Sun has proven that it scales up the tree very well with large numbers of processors. But from my understanding, Linux is more efficient with a low processor count, and less and less efficient with more processors.
I question its ability to do anything with a real workload. And I've even more suspicious because they use a benchmark I've never heard of to push its superiority on a single-aspect synthetic benchmark.
so?
Not sure what this is implying, but it seems to be a surprisingly common misconception that MacOSX has vector based artwork. Not so. GNOME can do, and I think KDE3.1 can as well, via SVG. MacOS icons though are just bitmaps in a variety of sizes, with some scaling/blending algorithms applied.
The SGI desktop is of course based on a heavily modified commercial X Server. And here I will stop for a second, get a big breath and say: 'wow'. I have never seen an X server being so fast, on a 5-year old machine (no matter if this is an SGI machine or not).
I'd kind of expect this given that IRIX comes as a bundle with the hardware. When you choose the hardware as well as the software you can of course optimize the drivers a lot, so you will get good speeds out of it. XFree has to deal with a lot of different hardware, and the driver manufacturers are sometimes less than helpful. Probably worth remember that IRIX won't have some of the newer X extensions like XRender.
SGI was very kind to send us in this dual Octane 2x195 Mhz MIPS machine accompanied with a 24" SGI-branded Trinitron monitor.
Otherwise, they would have had to shell out a whole $799.00 on eBay for one.
What did SGI do, pull one from the junk bin?
They should have sent some relatively modern hardware....
but, looking the terminal of the first screenshot, KDE is better (and a whole lot cheaper :) )
I went to SUNY-Fredonia and they had about 16 SGI O2's with IRIX running on them in the CompSci. lab. The machines looked pretty slick and they seemed like they'd be fun to use, but none of the faculty ever bothered to show us how to use them. (Or, for that matter, why we should use them when we had boatloads of Windows machines to do our work on.) A year after I graduated (in 2000), they were shoved in a storage closet somewhere to make room for more x86 machines running Windows (How ironic!)
(Sigh) What a waste...
What exactly do you want SGI to do with IRIX? Put it in a box, shrinkwrap it, and make it run your overclocked AMD chip-of-the-week? Probably won't happen.
Since IRIX 6.5, SGI has continued its promise to release quarterly updates. Each release introduces changes to the feature and maintenance stream.
I guess I'm confused as to what your hopes for IRIX are.
I haven't read the OSNEWS.com article yet, but I hope it isn't one of those "OS review" articles where they look at the installer and give it a rating.
-David
IRIX is doomed. SGI needs to compete against the movement to replace expensive high end workstations with economical Intel based Linux clusters. Ask Lucas, they dumped a bunch of SGI opting for Linux. It's basic economics.
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion
... being completely unsuitable for 3D work ...
I'm not saying X can't be improved for the sort of things we want now out a display protocol that we didn't know we'd want 10 years ago, but you can still get excellent performance from it if you know what you're doing, and you try.
T
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
IRIX Machines are huge in scientific computing.
However, since SGI announced that they wouldn't support IRIX anymore, everyone has concluded that they need to shift over to Linux machines.
Most people I know buy Dell machines. The cost savings is actually less of a concern for scientists (although it is an issue,) than keeping up with the state of the art.
If SGI released their IRIX source code, that would do a lot to help them recover their scientific market share; scientists would pay the extra money for SGI hardware if they aren't worried that support for the OS is going to evaporate entirely, and a Linux distro with lots of SGI-specific code imported from IRIX ought to fit that bill nicely. I'm a biologist, though, so maybe I'm missing something.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
If there only was some kind of free (as in beer, please don't stop reading, this is not supposed to start a flamewar :-))
IRIX distribution, maybe slimmed-down, so at least
more people could get hands on it and actually
try it out.
I mean: Many of us have read lots about IRIX, how it works neatly for graphics workstations etcpp., but how many of you actually were able to try it out?
IRIX could gain a huge boost in popularity if people could "try it at home" on cheap x86 hardware and then - maybe - convince people at work to buy it if it is ok for the job. Even a 30-day evaluation copy would be great.
IMHO, it was a great idea of Sun to give away SunOS/x86 for free for personal use. So I had the possibility of fiddling around with it at home and improve my work with Solaris at work.
Anyone out there providing ssh'd remote X access to an IRIX box so one could have a look?
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Recipe for technology article:
1 paragraph fluff
1 paragraph spin
1/2 cup FUD
Mix in HTML editor.
Publish.
Seriously, this article is light on details, and filled with inane comments like "the OS looks dated". While there were some good comments, half of the time it was gushing over the X server, or cheering over the fact that the author can run XMMS. What about performance? Applications? Hardware compatibility/expandibility? Talk to us about the box - does SGI/IRIX know about USB, for instance? FireWire?
Details please..
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
They just hired Jon "maddog" Hall to 'help SGI to sponsor and encourage a community-based "Extreme Linux" movement around SGI's NUMAFlex architecture.'
Got brain?
Whip me, beat me, make me administer IRIX.
Many years ago when I jad a chance to play with an O2, I fell in love with the window manager. This article doesn't mention it at all. Has SGI given up with it?
This is a fine example that X11 is a good graphics-server.
Although alot of X11 bashing has been going on IRIX shows us that X11 is actually a very viable and capable graphics-server and certainly gives the finger to all those X11 implementations which have been done BAD.
So please, next time you go and blame your sucky graphics on X11, take a good look at the implementation of it in your system.
I've got an old sgi indigo2 currently with irix 6.3 on it and most of the freeware I've found seems to be for irix 6.5, so my sgi has been in the cupboard. I'd like to give it a go again but I want to get some decent tools on it (like ssh for example ;).
one day I'll get hold of a 6.5 set of cd's and then I'll have another go.
dave
Simple fact: Irix is elegant. The 4DWM is far superior to almost anything that you can put on linux ( poor 5DWM project went away.. it was the salvation) For the end user 4DWM was simple, uncomplicated, and most of all fast.. I personally have several IRIX boxen that I wouldn't trade in for anything. The installation of free software http://freeware.sgi.com couldn't be made easier. recompiling the kernel ( one command) and the fact that when I stick in a second display sub-system it automatically sets it up for me. True the machines are starting to show wear and age, and for the most current hardware you are paing a fortune, but if you NEED a ferrari you pay for a ferrari, you don't take a Yugo ( PC) and stick a ferrari logo on it... There is the whole fact that IRIX is expensive, but you do pay for what you get. I can effectively use a R4000 or R4400 with the latest version of IRIX, and it runs just fine. Try that with a stock install of Linux on a machine that is 6 or 7 years old, you won't be happy.
IRIX could gain a huge boost in popularity if people could "try it at home" on cheap x86 hardware
So you think that SGI should spend huge amounts of money and development time porting IRIX to x86, and then give it away free, simply so that you can "try it out at home"?
Are you aware of the fact that IRIX does not run on x86 hardware? Are you aware of the fact that SGI will be moving to Linux on IA-64 in the future, rather than attempting to port IRIX to the IA-64? Do you, in fact, have any idea of how much work it would be to port IRIX to anything other than MIPS?
No? Didn't think so.
What killed SGI for us was their hideous treatment of customers. We had some SGI boxes with 10-Base T as web servers in the past. When we went to look at a 100-Base T card we discovered that all SGI wanted to do was to sell us new boxes. They priced then network card around $6000.
I read the article, but didn't bother to submit a story to /. because I found the article quite bad. IRIX may be quite good, but the author is all enthusiastic about features that I wouldn't think great wins myself. OK, you might dismiss this as a difference in taste, but I still think the author could look around a little more.
...
``The Guest account has quite some privillages by default, I was even able to install software, for example some KDE libraries and applications, so it was good enough to keep me going.''
It sounds like the author applauds this. Think about it, though. Would you really have Natalie Netuser log in to your box and have her install her own software? Apart from the security issues (which might not be there...I don't know exactly what kind of software you can or can't install), I think you'd better order that new hard drive already.
``The great thing about IRIX is that a lot of open source applications have been ported over to the proprierty X11 of IRIX''
Right. So IRIX is great because it can run all those open source apps that were developed with Linux and BSD in mind? OK, this might make IRIX better than some other proprietary OSen, but that doesn't necessarily make it great.
``X just works''
Yes, and so it would on Linux if the OS came preinstalled and tailored to the machine you ordered. That's not a feature of IRIX, it's the logical result of writing software for specific hardware (which, IMHO, shouldn't be necessary - standards should take care of that).
``Because there is one IRIX, one company behind it, and very specific versions, there are virtually no dependancy problems. Installations just work.''
Because there is one RedHat Linux | Windows | Mac OS, one monopoly behind it,
I mean, this sort of Just Works (WOW) goes against flexibility and freedom of choice. I don't know about IRIX, but I know that RedHat's packaging system gets confused when you install software via other means. Windows is a disaster (install from _what_ source?), and Apple is getting it right with OS X. ports rules!
``The window manager included on IRIX is the 4Dwm, while the toolkit used is the king of the Unix toolkits, Motif.''
I don't like 4Dwm, but I can see why others would. But Motif the king of Unix toolkits? Come on, speak for yourself, man. I don't even have Motif installed. All apps I use are either console or GTK, and there are a number of apps that would be cool to have, but not really worth installing Qt for. Motif _was_ king, yes, but it's reign is over.
---
Timeout error: Operator fell asleep while waiting for NT to complete boot sequence
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Irix is based on System V, it is nothing LIKE bsd... Irix's 64-bit'edness is dependent on the hardware that one runs it on, and porting recent opensource apps to it (at least 6.5.13 and back) can be quite a chore.
That said, it *IS* a wonderful OS. I have been an Irix user at home for over five years (has it been that long???) and overall since 4.0.5 back in my undergrad years (EH GADS, IT HAS BEEN THAT LONG!).
-johnny
http://www.martnet.com/~johnny
PS: As a side note, Irix has had it's fair share of security issues, but security is not SGI's primary focus... So it's somewhat understandable.
Please, can we have an OSNews / Eugenia filter for Slashdot?
Or is that some sort of German reworking of the Berkely c shell...? "tenex schnell"?
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
A lot of people are asking about benchmarks and complaining about how MIPS sucks on SpecFP tests and stuff. So I thought I'd offer a quick test I ran for the company a worked for when we where deciding whether to go Intel or SGI for compositing. We ran this test on a highend dual proc x86 workstation and a middle of the road single proc Octane2 (I don't remember the exact specs any more, but I do recall we had the same amount of RAM, 1.5 gigs, in both machines, so there was no advantage there).
Anyway we ran two tests, one comping 8 bit video res. footage and some relativly simple effects, and one comping 16 bit film res footage with a number of heavy effects. On the video res stuff the x86 work station convincingly beat the Octane2 every time. However on the film res stuff the Octane2 totaly left the x86 machine in the dust, it wasn't even close.
So basically, unless you have really heavy loads an sgi workstation won't really shine and you're probably better off with an x86 box. However once the load starts to seriously increas the x86 archetcture simply cannot keep up and that's when the sgi boxes really start to show off. It just doesn't matter how fast you CPU is if your machine cannot shuffle data to and from it quickly enough,
IRIX might have enterprise-level performance, but it suffers enormously in the usability department. I work in a lab where IRIX is standard, because 64-bit memory addressing and extreme graphics performance using ImageVision is a must. However, I keep running into issues with the development tools. Most impotantly, SGI's cc (c compiler) is slow and hard to customize flags on, especially for debugging. Furthermore, frequently, if my program commits a memory fault, it receives a SIGKILL rather than a segfault which makes it very difficult to debug (this usually happens if the malloc pool gets corrupted or while using ImageVision).
The ImageVision library (an OpenGL-based image processing system) hsa great performance and features. However, it refuses to link with programs not built with cc (thus, no gcc!). Furthermore, programs that seem to follow spec mysteriously die with a SIGKILL during deallocation. I certainly realise that I might be doing something wrong in the way I call the library, but it does not provide any error
message, exception, or fault.
Finally, IRIX standard header files are a colossal mess and almost impossible to use. Standard C and C++ objects are casually redefined throughout the header structure.
"first crash-resistant, high-performance file system "
Possibly, but you won't beat XFS for its high performance file system. Period. End of discussion.
XFS cleanly handles files that would choke your beloved BSD.
Moreso, it's *POSIX* compliant. But then, the BSD crowd never did care about POSIX.
I aquired a ye olde Indy from my Uni for about 30 quid a year back and was quite taken by the interface; I spent a fair amount of time getting my Linux/KDE to look exactly like it. I hope if SGI goes Linux that maybe they'll port their window manager over. That'd be nice of them.
We gave a CS lab with Sun boxen, but the entire dept pretty much uses the boatloads of Win machines in the open lab.
In engineering, everyone is pretty much stuck with Harris-donated Windows boxen. I wish there were Linux to be found.
They do have a bunch of Sun blade machines, but they are used only for cadence. I just last week got the SysAdmin to install OO.
Crash resistent? Yeah right. Tell you what , next time you boot up hi-tech FreeBSD , mount a DOS floppy disk , then pull the disk out , then try and write to that disk. You might want to back up anything you're doing before this however as 9 times out of 10 you'll get a total system crash. With bugs like this that linux sorted 10 years ago is it any wonder that anyone who knows anything about unix will not touch freebsd? If they can't fix glaring bugs like this what other horrors await under the stairs in the kernel?
Vector based graphics -- indeed they beat OS X to it. And how...nice...that desktop looks. Hrmmmmm. Umm--it seems more vanilla basic than even Windows 95.
I'll stick with OS X. Hell, it's father NEXTSTEP was out in '88 and had a slicker interface....
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
I still have a sour taste in my mouth from attempting the 6.2 to 6.5 migration several years ago. It was right about that time that our lab pretty much gave up on spending oodles of cash on O2 and Octane workstations and moved to low-cost pc's running linux. We haven't looked back since, and the fundamental differences (apart from price), were the benefits of having an open-source system, the GNU development tools, and the much easier to use package managers like apt and rpm versus the old SGI package manager whose name now escapes me. I must admit, clunky though it was, the Irix package manager did allow for rollbacks, something lacking in rpm or apt.
All that being said, we still have a few Indy's kicking around, and some people actually still use them!
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
You're not alone. I was in the CS department at Dartmouth College, and we too had a lab of cool SGI machines. Granted they were Indy's, but this was awhile ago. They were capable of all kinds of cool stuff, but all we ever got to use them for was a glorified xterm. AFAIK there was only one class that actually used them - the graphics class. The primary reason seemed to be that they supported OpenGL. I think they've been replaced since I was there.
All of her (his? its?) articles are completely myopic, focusing on "how nice/useable" is this as a desktop.
Evaluating Irix on its UI alone is completely useless.
XFS cleanly handles files that would choke your beloved BSD.
Um, no. Check out the 5.0 benches. No doubt this will get moded down, since it contradicts your ra-ra linux post.
any dumb article from a dumb broad (she's the same idiot who did the Red Hat 8.0 review)...
this seems to be the trend lately - let's use slashdot to get our Web page hits up so we can impress [insert whoever] at the next quarterly meeting...
the OSNEWS site is a waste, and is filled with Windows luser Linux wannabes..
The newest SGIs support USB and a few (maybe just O3K?) have firewire. On the big iron, USB has been a *really* nice upgrade from PS/2, especially on machines configured with multiple graphics pipes and multiple users. Rather than installing extra BaseIO modules for additional PS/2 hookups for additional users, you can now just plug in as many keys/mice as you'd like, bind each set to a certain number of graphics pipes. Helps us keep our Onyx 3800 flexible... most of the time it's running each of its three graphics pipes seperately... we have a config that'll drive three sets of keys/mice for three users, one graphics pipe driving two monitors per user. But when we need the power, we have one user driving all three pipes on a single multi-projector panoram screen. It's not totally plug and play, but it's a lot easier than it used to be.
Maybe you should clarify that you're talking about 8 bit and 16 bit *per component* not per pixel. 48 bit per pixel color and heavy lifting has been an SGI MIPS/IRIX strong point for a long time. Some folks use the 18 wheeler analogy... a high-RPM sports car will beat a big diesel 18 wheeler in a drag race... unless each is pulling a 60 ton trailer.
I'm running Irix 6.5.16 at home on my Indy, and I also installed the build of Gnome that SGI has made for Irix (because I HATE 4dwm!)
I just wish that SGI would make an up2date/Red Carpet like system for Irix, especially for the Gnome stuff - in the build I have, things like the pager applet don't work (which is a BIG pain - no virtual desktops!).
Also, supposedly Irix now supports IMP/S2 style mice (i.e. with a wheel) - but I have not been able to get it working on my system.
I'd put Linux on my Indy in a heartbeat IF the support for all the A/V systems was there....
www.eFax.com are spammers
XFS is originally on Irix so the post would be a ra-ra Irix post. What a minute, this is an Irix article. Weird.
so all of you fan boys who say "oh my $900 dollar linux boxen is as good" can shut the hell up cause you have obviously never layed your hands on a real workstation.
if i could afford the price tag, there would be no way that i would even consider buying a mac or a pc, i would go straight to SGI, and im seriously thinking about taking out a loan for an SGI fuel.
but anyways, relevent links are here
sgi octane 2
sgi fuel
studiotools
I want 2D games back.
moderators are supposed to read the article before they decide what's offtopic.
So why is Solaris' market share growing compared to AIX's?
Show me where on the Irix support policy page it says that it's not supported, and I'll believe you.
Do you, in fact, have any idea of how much work it would be to port IRIX to anything other than MIPS?
Seriously, I don't care. I was pointing out that offering a cheap evaluation copy of IRIX for cheap hardware could boost sales for IRIX powered equipment quite a bit. I was not suggesting that this should be done even if their departments don't have the money to do it.
So you think SGI, a company who does nothing but bleed money, should drop what they're doing and pay a dozen or so programmers' salaries for a year or two to get a semi-working version of IRIX for "cheap [x86] hardware" simply because you think it might boost sales of machines whose base price is about $6000?
You're either an idiot or you're on crack.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
IRIX doesnt look very good. This is version 6.5, you would at least expect a nicer desktop than what you get. I am aware that KDE and GNOME/Sawfish can be installed, but that's a pain. They should scrap this release, completely rework IRIX and release it as IRIX 7.0, as IRIX is starting to grasp obsolescence, even though the switch to XFS was a good move for IRIX.
Anyone can upgrade to 6.5.17 if you have the 6.5 base CDs. You can download the 6.5.17 overlays from the maintenance stream at SGI. If you want a more automated update with updated applications then you need to subscribe to the feature stream. To subscribe to the feature stream you will need to buy a copy of IRIX from SGI. Last time I checked the price it was about $600 down from $1200 from several years ago.
Yes. But you don't seem to understand what "try it out at home" means. It would be quite a boost for the amount of people that know about the OS.
Of course. Just like Sun hardware sales have shot through the roof since Solaris has been available for download. No doubt Sun's recent anouncement and release of hardware which is running Linux is simply a coincedence, and Solaris users are growing at a rate of 300% PA.
You see, the number of people who "understand IRIX" is totally irelevent, as SGI are dropping IRIX in favour of Linux (With lots of IRIX features and XFS, of course). By the time SGI had done porting IRIX to the x86, it would be useless and irelivent.
Or, as we used to call it, the five finger salute.
I used to work in a lab at the University of Chicago where we had, depending on the time, anywhere from 8-13 SGIs..02s at the time I worked there, but Indys earlier.
I managed to snag one of those INdys when they were being trashed. The 02s are just lying around doing nothing, the last I heard.
Which was a shame. They were the first UNIXen I really played with to any great extent.
The most significant thing about this article is that it could have been written 4 years ago.
How can I watch movies on IRIX? Which formats? What about nonlinear video editing?
I preface this with the fact that I haven't worked with Solaris 9 yet.
If you want to do a custom installation of the OS, Sun's OS installer for version 8 IS HORRIBLE. I changed jobs three years ago, and I moved from a predominantly SGI environment to one that's predominantly Solaris.
The OS installation tools for IRIX three years ago still are BETTER than what Sun currently offers up in Solaris 8 TODAY. What's there is putrid and annoying. The IRIX installation allowed you to select packages based on package names and wildcarding, whereas Sun uses a number-based scheme, and the numbers change from monthly release to monthly release. IT SUCKS!!!!!!
We do a lot of customized OS installations (the most minimal core OS, plus some additional packages) for security reasons, and we don't have enough common system types to make the Solaris automated installation worthwhile.
I wish Solaris would join the 21st century in this regard.
The writer of the article mentioned desktop usability. The desktop that was displayed looked like TWM, and I can understand the concerns. But it's a Unix for cryin' out loud! If you don't like something there are at least half a dozen replacements for it. I'm sure XFce would compile on it, which is my favorite. If not, take a look at Window Manager for X for all the X window manager known to Unix.
crash-resistant, high-performance file system. Ever heard of "XFS"??? It's journaled and has been around almost longer than the FreeBSD project.
First multithreaded kernel: Um.... Right... Multithreaded kernels have been around for probably a decade if not more. FreeBSD is hardly the first. Irix has had kernel threads for ages. The first reference I can find to them is in '95 (and I suspect they have been around longer than that) when FreeBSD didn't even run on multiprocessor systems.
First "compact" kernel: What is a "compact" kernel? The FreeBSD kernel is a monolithic BSD kernel. Irix is a monolithic System V kernel. Even Linux is a monolithic kernel (of Linus + other's design). Microkernels haven't lived up to their initial hype (though MacOS X uses one), but neither they nor monolithic kernels are "obsolete".
Now don't get me wrong, FreeBSD is a great OS. I have run it in the past and regularly use it. But it doesn't run on 1024 processors, have multiple tens of terabytes of storage in a single filesystem, and manage a terabyte of RAM. It's not designed for that. Irix is.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Minor quibble, but it mentions it's different than Linux because it's UCB BSD based. It's not (well, it is up to teh point that SVR4 took a lot of BSDisms) but it's SVR4 machine. Linux distros generally take a bit from classic BSD, a bit from SVR4, and a bit of whatevehell else they want, so they're all a bit different.
being 23 hrs. Strangely, this is much better than
the record holder, a RedHat default install, which was rooted in 8 minutes.
Also, I think Irix was a weired variant of System V, and porting to Irix was always a pain.
So, what is it with OS News? Are they just a bunch of narcissistic attention whores? This is, what, the third lame review of theirs that has been on slashdot in the last week or so?
GrumpyOldUnixGuy
Everytime we try to upgrade Irix we just find more and more bugs. We currently use 6.5.12 and if we try to go any higher our applications start breaking. Upgrading to 6.5.16 broke xemacs for us even. Then we just get a run around for weeks when we report the bugs and they are always "fixed" in the new version but never are.
--
Disgruntled SGI Customer
'This is a Unix system. I know this.'
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Package management on IRIX is great, but there's nothing wrong with Solaris. Custom installations with Solaris Jumpstart are extremely easy and flexible.
I'm not sure where your number-based package scheme is coming from, because I've not seen any such thing in Solaris (2.5 to 9). You may be confusing patches (which are numbered xxxxxx-yy), with packages (mostly SUNWxxxx).
With the Flash Archives and LiveUpgrade stuff that's been quietly appearing in the later revisions of Solaris 8, it's as good or better than anyone else's installation scheme. Furthermore, you'll have much better control, documentation, and repeatability using automated hands-off Solaris systems. I simply won't do Solaris installs of the CD any more.
Use the tools that are there, they'll make your life much easier.
I use inst daily, I don't have a problem with it. If you're getting so many conflicts then maybe you're not doing it right (maybe you forgot to read a package?). The most common cause of getting loads of 'conflicts' when installing IRIX is forgetting to read the 'unbundled' distribution, which is usually on the last Overlays CD (on Overlays 3 of 4 with 6.5.16).
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Moderator's essentials
Original post located here.
That is why much of the post is not in context with the parent article.
2x195MHz MIPS you're saying is the same thing as a 400MHz Intel? :-) That's ridiculous.
First off, MIPS is 64 bit, so the dual CPU is more like a 800MHz Intel.
Second, MIPS has a huge cache, like 2MB or so. Intels have tiny caches.
Third, SGI architecture has a huge internal bandwidth. Intel comes nowhere near that.
SGI's compiler (MIPSPro) is slow to compile because it does some really powerlifting stuff with the optimisations. .o files.
I did a lot of tests with gcc and MIPSPro, and gcc doesn't come near to the SGI compiler.
The neatest trick is that MIPSPro does a global optimisation after linking the
If you want your binaries to run really fast, use MIPSPro; forget gcc.
SGI has lost all their jedi developers, and as Eugenia mentions how Dominic Giampaolo went from SGI, to Be. Dominic now works for Google, as of 2 years ago. But that isn't the only person who has jumped ship at SGI, countless other faces, and names no longer reside at the old 'cool place to work'. The stock price was a penny-stock for awhile. Their hardware bussiness is lagging behind, and basically not moving forward. There has not been any new inovations from SGI in the past 3 or 4 years. In short, the industry finally caught up with SGI, and they have lost their graphics nitche. What Eugina doesnt' know, among many many many things, is that Sun is filling the void that was left open by SGI.
Anyways, his review of Irix is a version that is now old. It would be one thing if this was a hot new release of Irix 6.6 (non-existent), or some major point release. This version is a maintance release, and is old now. We have version 6.5.18, as of a week ago or so.... SGI sent me the new disc's. Also, booting the system up, and playing with the OpenGL crap is lame. Sorry, but it might impress an idiot, or people who have never played quakeII. Mozilla is not that impressive, and neither is the port of KDE or Gnome for Irix. These are things that, well, are not very interesting considering these tools run on just about all *nix variants now. Only a noobie would think otherwise. His bench mark analysis is to simply say "x seems to run faster on this old box", with no numbers or anything. Basically there is no relevance to his claims.
What I see is a guy who got a new toy to write about, and is all wet behind the ears. I use SGI computers evry day, and they are not all that! I have everything from O2, indiego, to bing honking 12-way Onyx clusters.
So let me explain what is nice about IRIX, for somebody that really does use it, and isn't still inthe first day experience level. Think about it, when you first tried Linux, or FreeBSd for the first time, as in never touched *nix before. If red hat was your first distro, say aorund version 7.*... your review might look something like Eugina's: noobie'ish! Sure, you can click'ity'clickty around the menus, launch softwareyou have never seen beofre.... ohh... ahhh...ooo.... wow! Whatever! The good thing about Irix is the fact that evrything is doable with a pretty gui tool. It was apparent from the early stages in Irix that people at that company were tired of the command line. For example, their package manager (aka software install tool) swmgr is fully graphical, and probably the best software installer for Unix there is, hands down. The upside is they also have another just-as-good version of the tool for the commandline. Sun could take some hints from what SGI has done inteh swmgr tool. For example, it has pie charts of filesystem utilization, with colors that represent what the other softwre packs take up, and what it would take to isntall this new peice. Everything look perfect. On the other hand, the X window system in general is lacking, the toolchest is gay. Lets face it, the SGI default desktop is kinda bleak, and empty. Maybe I'm a bit too used to CDE, KDE, or whatever.... but the first thing everyone I know does is install KDE to get some real work done. The day to day work of a developer wis what makesIrix nice to work on. The diff tool highlites the changes in files in an inteligent way, the ps program is graphical, or not, and is easy to spot problems with. The NIS, NFS, AFS work with gui tools to make things easy, yet all these tools could be used in a command line only mode. For those subterainian-commandlien dwealers, your still taken care of, and nicely too.
XSF is not like BFS, no matter how much Eugina want to think they are the same. They are not! It is true that XFS is more unixlike where bfs was more Be like. Both are 64 bit namespace safe, both have extensible attributes, but on XFS you have to really work hard to mess with these features. This is one area SGI needs to improve. The tools that ship with IBM's JFS are the best, but the features of XFS are probably better than JFS. Basically put, SGI XFS just works, without much tweaking. Or if you want, you can mess with the XFS. These days SGI is getting out of the graphics biz, and moving into the storage server biz. So maybe they will improve the XFS options/administration.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
linux and PCs has not revived SGI. In hindsight, SGI should have stuck with MIPS and moved to BSD instead. Then they'd be way ahead and innovating instead of redoing in linux what's already been done in BSD all over again for no good reason other than Not Invented Here. linux is nothing new. In fact, it's not even very good compared to more mature and robust operating systems such as IRIX or BSD.
My company used SGIs for CAD/CAM workstations (running Pro/Engineer) until 3 odd years ago when it became apparent that a (much faster) NT box was a better fit for our users. As we had a bunch of equipment lying around I installed Samba on an Origin200 and a few O2's and setup a Windows NT workgroup/domain which has been very stable. I run Apache/PHP/MySQL on these machines as well and everything works well. /lib32 o32s are in /lib directories. Much open source software has a problem with that and SGI's linker is very picky as well. You end up having to dink around with Makefiles and LDFLAGS and other things to get things to compile.
I ditched 4Dwm years ago for Windowmaker (which although you lose some of the desktop icons, etc, is a much better wm from a useability standpoint).
My biggest complaint about Irix is the libraries. Compiling GNU and other open source software is rather painful because SGI has 2 ABI's o32 and n32, the latter is the newer and what most software is compiled with. n32s libraries are in
There is, however, a pile of pre-compiled freeware on SGI's web site and I tend to use that as a first choice, however frequently some of the options I need aren't compiled in and I have to do it myself. Luckily Windowmaker, for one, compiles perfectly using gcc and SGI's freeware libraries and tools.
I use an SGI at work daily as my desktop to write PHP code for the web stuff I do here at work.
I have an Indigo2 at home I paid $50 for and I still use it as my email-reading machine, (although I now access it via cygwin-Xfree86 on my new PC)
I have my eye one one of the newer O2's I use daily when we finally take them off-line
These things cost the earth when we bought them but they're all still running fine even after 8 years of continous use.
Great machines..
Elegant. That is also the word I would choose.
Now, for some inelegent ramblings about cool hardware and software..
I used IRIX for many years down in the big-3 automotive industry. Having the absolutely latest and greatest SGI on my desktop from '92 to '96 was Sweet (I had my choice of IBM, Alpha, Sun or HP).
I then moved to a company where I implemented roughly 15 Origin 2000 systems and a bunch of Origin 200's. More fun. The "CrayLink" cables used to quickly build larger machines were just awesome.
SGI employees "got it". They took extreme pride in their product. They optimized those things that weren't elegant as a matter of pride. They had attention to DETAIL. Those things were and are missing at HP, Sun, etc - they did fixes only if it would increase PROFIT. There's a lot to be said on the business front about those two approaches, but this is about *TECH*. And SGI blew everyone away.. In many respects, they still do.
I can remember in 1996.. An internal customer lost an HP-UX filesystem (massive corruption, FSCK core dumps, typical HP) after putting 8000 files in a single directory. Just for the heck of it, I created 1 million files in a directory under XFS. No problems, decent performance.
Years later, I worked with the latest 4 way DEC Alpha EV6 systems. The CPUs were very fast, but the OS throughput and file system were SLOW. Moving and extracting an 80 gig tarball was many times faster under XFS on a 4 way Origin than on an Alpha... The OS, file system, memory and bus bandwidth all contributed to that.
Compaq was *awful* when it came to AdvFS support and performance. We found many performance bugs and corruption bugs. It is one of the worst file systems I have ever used.
The desktop, session management, scalable icons, drag and drop support for browsers, it was all cool.
Their software installation tool, 'inst', remains the best I have used. RPM is so embarrassingly *pathetic*.
It is easy to laugh at a 195 Mhz R10000 CPU. But don't laugh too much. In '97, I compiled GNU emacs 19.34b on an 8 CPU Origin 2000 with those "slow" R10K's. It took 9.2 seconds for the parallel build to complete and dump the loaded emacs binary. We did the make clean and make over and over again in amazement. It would be interesting to repeat that with the latest and greatest Origin hardware (though the bloat and slowness of recent emacs versions is getting silly).
I still have a 60 Mhz Indigo w/Elan graphics. Awesome little machine and piece of history. It still runs IRIX 6.5.
And XFS has been rolled into the 2.5 kernel!
SGI is still trying to claw their way back in a difficult industry. I hope they make it.
IBM is doing fine in the market, and so is Sun (who grew their Unix market share last quarter). This makes any massive migration from Sun to Big Blue unlikely.
I'm sure that a brand new $2500 Dell Workstation can do many things faster than a 1996 era $25,000 SGI workstation. I highly doubt you have even seen a brand new $25,000 SGI workstation or have any idea what it can do.
Considering there appear to be more Windows boxes in the world I would suspect that there are more developers on the Windows platform than any other single platform. That said, I don't think it is fair to castigate a school for choosing Windows over any other proprietary platform.
My school used a lot of donated hardware/software, and generally the only companies that can afford to donate labs worth of hardware/software are doing so to push their own proprietary platform. So we ended up doing our development on Sun, DEC and HP workstations.
The jar format is exactly equivalent to zip, which seems to work pretty well.
First they'd have to dump the 1970s tar and vi they're still shipping. :-( solaris blows.
I am a big IRIX and SGI fan. Go ahead - make fun of those old 195 Mhz R10K CPUs. But you gotta beat this...
;-)
Date: February 1997
System: 8 CPU Origin 2000
CPU: R10000, 195 Mhz
Benchmark: Full build of emacs 19.34b
That system could do it in 9.2 seconds (nine point two). That included everything - X11 support and dumping the binary with the standard lisp modules.
We did the build over and over again. It was just awesome.
This is what they mean by 'system bandwidth' and attention to detail. Of course those systems do other things that are more impressive, but this is one you can try yourself
Can anyone beat those numbers? I'd love to run it on a modern Origin.
If you're looking to build a network of machines, stay away from IRIX. There's not kerberos support, no pam, no extendible way to login other than local files and NIS. If SGI were to include kerberos support, the urgent move to Linux we are doing here wouldn't be needed, although we'd still move, albeit slower. The apps that demanded an SGI took 22 minutes on dual octane, versus 3:40 on P4. Screw IRIX.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
How one uses Jumpstart to install something you've never installed before?
In order for you to have a Jumpstart config, doesn't someone somewhere have to do the OS install from scratch?
Several people have commented on Linux for SGI machines. Currently the only fully supported hardware is the Indy, all others lacking a working Xserver. On the Indy, linux performs very well, and X is nice and fast for such an old machine (8 bit though). So for the people who didn't buy that cheap SGI machine because they couldn't find Irix for it, get it anyway, install Linux. The quality of the hardware is fantastic.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Not gonna happen. Although they've released XFS for Linux (I love it) and are committed to OSS they will only make IRIX for their mips processors. Mainly because they control "Mips technologies" or whatever they are called and have direct and total control over what's happening inside the CPU. You think AMD or Intel would give sgi this kind of info?
"Hollywood's growing usage of Linux clusters for rendering isn't helping either."
And Linux clusters are great for that. Or any job that don't require high internal memory bandwith. But when you DO need that, nothing except Cray comes close to sgi.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Ugh. IRIX. I used to have to deal with IRIX machines. I was very, very, very happy when we junked those and replaced them with Suns.
The SGI hardware was nice, but very expensive. (weird nonstandard memory which cost 10 times what it should, etc.) Whereas the Suns took standard parts which we could buy anywhere (DIMMs, PCI cards, etc.)
But the hardware and associated costs were a very small factory in why we (Harvey Mudd College computer science department) moved away from them... the reason was the fact that IRIX just plain sucked.
IRIX has the worst security of any UNIX-like OS I've ever used. Unpacking an SGI meant spending hours fixing holes before letting it come anywhere near a network.. (deleting default [passwordless] users, turning off insecure network software, etc.) And even then they weren't secure at all due to fundamental flaws (mostly design decisions to make the machines "user friendly")
They were also annoying for an admin because IRIX is just plain _weird_ if you're used to other versions of UNIX (I dealt with Solaris, Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD at Mudd)... The admin tools and config files are in strange places, use non-standard options, etc.
yes, the had good OpenGL support (duh). But so does everybody these days. Today it's more imporotant to have good security and easy administration.
Plus it's still as ugly as it ever was. Give me Gnome or Mac OS X any day. (Heck, even Windows XP looks better, and that's saying something!)
-- Tim Buchheim
I agree. The cool machines don't need gfx-cards.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Becuase FreeBSD can only run on TOY HARDWARE.
IRIX runs on boxes with 512 and 1024 PROCESSORS!
FreeBSD can barely handle a dual 386 box...
When your little toy can even come close to maybe kinda sorta running on big iron maybe someone will give a tiny fuck.
Your whole arguement relies on the assumption that slashdorks are capable of thinking for themselves. This is a fallacy.
It's high performance until the power gets cut for some reason and you have to sit through an fsck while the downtime clock ticks...
Leaving out pirated copies (Windows and Visual C++ anyone?), you get more people that learn and program for an OS if it is free (as in beer). Just because they can get it for free and give it a try. Even more people are willing to work with an OS that is free AND OpenSource.
You're right that Linux is as popular as it is because it's OpenSource. No doubt about it. But MANY people I know just don't care about it being OpenSource. This is maybe the second thought. They're switching because it's free as in beer.
AmigaOS cost money but came bundled with the computer. Windows... let's say the same. BeOS used to cost money; then it went free for evaluation/personal use. SunOS/x86 the same. Linux is free and even comes with a compiler and development tools.
SunOS/x86 is free (beer), Linux is free/free. Sure. So most choosing a Unix-like OS will go straight to Linux because of the additional free (speech) and coolness benefit. (Solaris, on the other hand, gets a boost for free because most programs written for Linux will run on it as well.)
Apart from the hardware IRIX usually runs on, the only obvious benefit - compared to Linux - appears to me to be the nice desktop and integrated GL support. I'm trying to point out that only a few people will ever experience these features because you already have to own it to try it. Of course it would cost a bunch of money to make an x86 evaluation available. But what's wrong with the idea?
My original posting seems to polarize: "Troll=2, Insightful=2, Interesting=1, Total=5". Well... this really wasn't in any way supposed to be trolling and still ain't. IMHO trolling would have been something like "Ha! Those bastards will never sell their OS until it is available for free!!!1".
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Please stop sending messages that do not have any support. Obviously you're talking without having the slightest clue.
For your information, if you go to www.sgi.com, in just one click (on Products/Servers) you can see how mistaken you are.
According to the webpage http://www.sgi.com/servers/ the SGI Origin 3000 have "Up to 716 GB/sec" internal bandwitdh. How do you compare that to the 1GB/s of your PC?
I agree, the Origin 3000 is not a graphical workstation, but SGI's focus shifted from graphical stations to supercomputers.
You were comparing PCs with SGI workstations, which indeed do not have a large technical superiority over PCs nowadays.
It is a good thing you noticed your own mistake: the Origin's are MIPS, not IA64.
;-) And yes, i do use systems with three-digit CPU numbers.
I also noticed you are aware of the selling point of the Origins: extremely high bandwidth, single OS copy. This way, you can have one single large dataset accessed by all CPUs directly (over NUMA). The Beowulf clusters choke when trying to do this, because of the ridiculous latencies of the network.
I am not sure whether or not it is true "very few applications actually demand high IO"; they are few indeed, but not quite so "very few". As a plus, the ones that do exist are large cash providers, since they are usually required by the government and three-letter agencies. Also, the contracts in this area are not the quickly dissapearing kind. That's why you won't see SGI going away anytime soon.
P.S. reply to your P.S.: I own (as in: me, personally, not my company) an SGI Indy. At work, i deal currently with tens of SGI systems, from the oldest/smallest, to the newest.
I have to say I love 4dwm, it just has a very nice intergrated feeling to it, but i guess it could be made to look more modern, I'm sure there should be someway to retrofit that.
And if you love 4dwm, there's 5dwm for linux and other unices that imitates it.
As for IRIX, thanks but no thankx. The prospect of paying many thousands of dollars to use IRIX doesn't exactly turn me on.
The ultimate solution, of course, is to make your own system. There is nothing magical about SGI systems. They're made out of parts, just like any other computer system. The difference is, they're made out of better parts. If you want that kind of performance at a reasonable price, you'd best figure out how to make your own computer; and, quite frankly, that's not too difficult. Simplified, you buy the power, buy the hard drive, the RAM, the mother-board, the CPU, the graphics card, the sound card, the network card, and so on and so forth and put them in their slots. If you want SGI-level performance, you buy MIPS chips. You also, of course, have to get other parts that are high quality. You'll probably want a 15,000 RPM hard drive, and good RAM. Currently, the best RAM to get is DDR RAM. But SLD RAM and MRAM might be the way of the future. As for graphics cards, currently, I'd say bo with the Radeon 9500Pro. But Nvidia's Quadro4 is a nice professional graphics card. In short, if you know what you're doing, you can build your own system to exactly meet your needs, and get it at a decent price.
Think about it. You will necessarily get a better price if you build your own system, as opposed to buy one from a OEM. OEM's have to make money; they can't sell you the systems at the cost they paid for them -- if they did, they wouldn't make any money.
So anyways, I say if you really want what SGI has to offer, make your own system; don't spend 10 grand. Then put Debian GNU/Linux on it (Debian now can be installed on a MIPS architecture).
Best of all, you'll be able to choose your own Window Manager. If you want something that's really great overall, you can go with WindowMaker (I don't see why GNOME and KDE get so much attention, while WindowMaker gets none; wmaker is light years ahead of anything else in terms of usability). On the other hand, if you want something light and spartan, you can go with PWM. Meanwhile, you can use the nice Xfce desktop environment.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This is weird. My Octane arrived the day this article was posted. I personally like 4dwm. Clean and simple.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
cp:
$
Nice try.
Apparently you don't know anything about XFS. Recovery time is independant of the filesystem size. xfs_check takes only a few seconds to execute and then you're on your way. Read about it at www.sgi.com or sit down in front of a machine for a while.
The only thing an SGI might still have over a PC is that an SGI can do 48bit RGBA, and PC graphics generally dont go past 32bit, and 48bit RGBA is essential for high-fidelity image processing (film work) i've been led to believe. But that will change too - 48bit RGBA cards for PCs will be commonly available within a year or two i'll bet.
The latest greatest PC hardware is the ATI Radeon 9700 card with its DirectX 9 functions. It can accomodate a number of different pixel representations including representations with more than 16 bits per color channel. The representation everyone mentions is 32-bit-per-channel floating point RGBA; 128 bit color. The output to the ramdac is maximum 10-bit per channel, but since your CRT display can't use more than 10-bit color, that doensn't matter. The accuracy of the operations in the graphics memory can far exceed the old Reality Engine accuracy.
I'm not aware of software that actually utilizes high accuracy color so far.
"Multiply in your head" (ordered the compassionate Dr. Adams) "365,365,365,
365,365,365 by 365,365,365,365,365,365". He [ten-year-old Truman Henry
Safford] flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the
tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes
smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in an agony, until, in not more
than one minute, said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,225!"
An electronic computer might do the job a little faster but it wouldn't be
as much fun to watch.
-- James R. Newman, "The World of Mathematics"
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