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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..."
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...
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
There'd need to an x86 IRIX first, and that would take some time and money to develop. And giving it away free simply to promote it doesn't really sound like a good strategy for SGI. If I remember correctly, SGI is facing hard times these days during the slump of the tech sector. Hollywood's growing usage of Linux clusters for rendering isn't helping either.
SGI machines are simply too expensive to be a commodity machine, and anyone who buys one already has some application or requirement that made the purchase necessary (not simply because he thought it was sort of fun to play with the free x86 version).
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
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.
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Timeout error: Operator fell asleep while waiting for NT to complete boot sequence
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
SGI have announced that they're not supporting IRIX ??!?!? Since when ? Please provide a link to your source of information. And why should any company release for free the source code of their product ? They've put many years of effort into IRIX why should they release it to the great unwashed masses ? All (!) SGI have to do is get a good entry level system back into their range of workstations and price it to attract. Linux is OK but it always lives in BETA or ALPHA versions of everything, people start projects then give up when it gets to the boring bits like documentation or bug fixing, this is where "proper" commercial software wins, it's supported by people whose only job is to support that bit of software and things are documented so that if the lead programmer gets run over by a bus the project can continue. Regards Mark
false. sgi does and will continue to support irix, virtually forever. period. ask them if you don't believe me. or, even better, back up your claim with a press release, web page on sgi's site, etc. you will not find either, anywhere.
"IRIX Machines are huge in scientific computing."
Well, they used to be, but are fading fast. At least in my area (Space systems operations, simulation & analysis).
Why?
- Their floating point performance sucks.
- PC graphics performance is now good enough for most applications.
- They are hugely expensive
2 years ago I ported a large astrodynamics simulation from Irix to Linux. Had a brand new Octane and a brand new dual PIII 700MHz running Redhat. I don't remember what chips the Octane had, but they were the best available at the time. And the Octane had twice the RAM.
This very floating point intensive simulation ran about 3x faster on the PC which cost about 10x less ($3K vs. ~$30K).
My boss just asked me if we should buy a service agreement for one of our older Octanes. $5K/year. I told him no. If it dies, we'll spend half that to upgrade to a faster Linux box.
Don't get me wrong. If you need the kind of huge bandwidth and massive multi-processing that higher end SGI's can give you, there is no question that SGI rocks. But at the workstation level, forget it.
And, FWIW, IRIX is absolutely the least stable Unix I've ever worked with. And I've worked with a few.
Uh, I do a bit of 3d, but only just enought to be intelligently stupid about it...but I don't use Oracle databases for my asset management...I couldn't care less what a database did on my CG box...memory transfers however is exactly what I would want to be fast.
:)
And syncing large numbers of threads/cpu's, well, that is handy when doing a distributed render, but remember here: Irix is NOT Linux...just as linux is not unix
Anyway, I'd say they used the correct benchmark...especially for a workstation running a 3d app.
But as I said, IANA3DExpert...
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
It's like saying my Miata is horrible for towing the boat. It's not made for that.
(*disclaimer -- I don't actually drive a Miata)
The truth is even Solaris has caught up to Irix in terms of usability, 3d speed, and multimedia-ness unless you get a stack of Onyx machines.
What kind of crack are you smoking? Sun released a new graphics workstation last year that they said could compete with an Octane 2. At the same time SGI released Fuel which roughly doubles performance over Octane 2. At SigGraph Sun was showing an in-development high end graphics targetted at InfiniteReality3. SGI released at the show InfiniteReality4 and also backed it up with 128p (on the show floor). Sun has not caught up.
I see. So, if I have an interest in farming, it would be OK (and somehow useful) for me to do a review on whether or not a Corvette makes a good tool for plowing.
What is the logic for evaluating the desktop/gui of something that isn't designed for such, and therefore, logically, does not have much emphasis or time dedicated to it?
In order for a review of something to be useful, it should focus on what the tool is designed to do, not what your "interest" is.
I do, however, agree that benchmarks are often quite useless. The way it any machine performs is highly dependant on what mix of jobs/applications you plan to run on it.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Indeed, I find it very interesting that they would use a benchmark that measures memory bandwidth through the graphics subsystem of a graphics workstation. It tells me what I need to know about what the system needs to do.
"There are a million things that you don't know. That doesn't make them secrets."- R.B. Fairchild
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.
Eugenia is a extremely vain person who qualifies her comments by referring to past comments she's made on other subjects.
/. login info. to work...
Most of her reviews are crap.
OSNews is ok, but quickly becoming Eugenia's personal weblog -She tends to mod down anyone who offers opinions which disagree with her, and woe to those who might offer suggestions or constructive criticisms.
Some of the 3rd party articles and reviews are great, but Eugenia's quickly trashing what a couple of months ago was a site w/great potential.
Damn... I've gotta remember to bring my