IRIX ( ) is a discontinued

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

developed by

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

(SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on

UNIX System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

with

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the

XFS XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; as ...

file system and the industry-standard

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

graphics system.

History

SGI originated the IRIX name in the 1988 release 3.0 of the operating system for the

SGI IRIS 4D The SGI IRIS series of terminals and workstations from Silicon Graphics was produced in the 1980s and 1990s. IRIS is an acronym for Integrated Raster Imaging System. Overview 68000 The early systems up to IRIS 3000 use the Motorola 68000 series ...

series of workstations and servers. Previous releases are identified only by the release number prefixed by "4D1-", such as "4D1-2.2". The "4D1-" prefix continued to be used in official documentation to prefix IRIX release numbers. Prior to the IRIS 4D, SGI bundled the GL2 operating system, based on

UniSoft UniSoft Corporation is an American software developer established in 1981, originally focused on the development of Unix ports for various computer architectures. Based in Millbrae, California, it now builds standardization and conformance test ...

UniPlus

System V Unix Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

, and using the proprietary MEX (Multiple EXposure)

windowing system In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm for ...

. IRIX 3.x is based on

Release 3 with

4.3BSD The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s. 1BSD (PDP-11) The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify an ...

enhancements, and incorporates the 4Sight

, based on

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...

and

IRIS GL IRIS GL (Integrated Raster Imaging System Graphics Library) is a proprietary graphics API created by Silicon Graphics (SGI) in the early 1980s for producing 2D and 3D computer graphics on their IRIX-based IRIS graphical workstations. Later SGI rem ...

. SGI's own

Extent File System Extent File System (EFS) is an older extent-based file system used in IRIX releases prior to version 5.3. It has been superseded by XFS XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. ...

(EFS) replaces the System V filesystem. IRIX 4.0, released in 1991, replaces 4Sight with the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

(X11R4), the

4Dwm 4Dwm is the window manager component of the IRIX Interactive Desktop normally used on Silicon Graphics workstations running IRIX. 4Dwm is derived from the older Motif Window Manager and uses the Motif widget toolkit on top of the X Window System ...

window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction ...

providing a similar look and feel to 4Sight. IRIX 5.0, released in 1993, incorporates certain features of UNIX System V Release 4, including

ELF An elf () is a type of humanoid supernatural being in Germanic mythology and folklore. Elves appear especially in North Germanic mythology. They are subsequently mentioned in Snorri Sturluson's Icelandic Prose Edda. He distinguishes "ligh ...

executables. IRIX 5.3 introduced the

journaling file system A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of changes not yet committed to the file system's main part by recording the goal of such changes in a data structure known as a "journal", which is usually a circular log. In the even ...

. In 1994, IRIX 6.0 added support for the 64-bit MIPS

R8000 The R8000 is a microprocessor chipset developed by MIPS Technologies, Inc. (MTI), Toshiba, and Weitek.Hsu 1994 It was the first implementation of the MIPS IV instruction set architecture. The R8000 is also known as the ''TFP'', for ''Tremendous Flo ...

processor, but is otherwise similar to IRIX 5.2. Later 6.x releases support other members of the MIPS processor family in 64-bit mode. IRIX 6.3 was released for the

SGI O2 The O2 was an entry-level Unix workstation introduced in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) to replace their earlier Indy series. Like the Indy, the O2 used a single MIPS microprocessor and was intended to be used mainly for multimedia. Its ...

workstation only. IRIX 6.4 improved

multiprocessor Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...

scalability for the

Octane Octane is a hydrocarbon and an alkane with the chemical formula , and the condensed structural formula . Octane has many structural isomers that differ by the amount and location of branching in the carbon chain. One of these isomers, 2,2,4-Tri ...

Origin 2000 The SGI Origin 2000 is a family of mid-range and high-end server computers developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics (SGI). They were introduced in 1996 to succeed the SGI Challenge and POWER Challenge. At the time of introduction, these r ...

, and Onyx2 systems. The Origin 2000 and Onyx2 IRIX 6.4 was marketed as "Cellular IRIX", although it only incorporates some features from the original Cellular IRIX

distributed operating system A distributed operating system is system software over a collection of independent software, networked, communicating, and physically separate computational nodes. They handle jobs which are serviced by multiple CPUs. Each individual node holds a ...

project. The last major version of IRIX is 6.5, released in May 1998. New minor versions of IRIX 6.5 were released every quarter until 2005, and then four minor releases. Through version 6.5.22, there are two branches of each release: a

maintenance release A maintenance release (also minor release or Maintenance Pack or MP) is a release of a product that does not add new features or content. For instance, in computer software, maintenance releases are typically intended to solve minor problems, typi ...

(identified by an "m" suffix) that includes only fixes to the original IRIX 6.5 code, and a feature release (with an "f" suffix) that includes improvements and enhancements. An overlay upgrade from 6.5.x to the 6.5.22 maintenance release was available as a free download, whereas versions 6.5.23 and higher required an active Silicon Graphics support contract. A 2001 ''

Computerworld ''Computerworld'' (abbreviated as CW) is an ongoing decades old professional publication which in 2014 "went digital." Its audience is information technology (IT) and business technology professionals, and is available via a publication website ...

'' review found IRIX in a "critical" state. SGI had been moving its efforts to

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and the

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

-based

SGI Visual Workstation SGI Visual Workstation is a series of workstation computers that are designed and manufactured by SGI. Unlike its other product lines, which used the 64-bit MIPS RISC architecture, the line used Intel Pentium II and III processors and shipped ...

but MIPS and IRIX customers convinced SGI to continue to support its platform through 2006. On September 6, 2006, an SGI press release announced the end of the MIPS and IRIX product lines. Production ended on December 29, 2006, with final deliveries in March 2007, except by special arrangement. Support for these products ended in December 2013 and they will receive no further updates. Much of IRIX's core technology has been open sourced and ported by SGI to Linux, including XFS. In 2009, SGI filed bankruptcy and then was purchased by

Rackable Systems Silicon Graphics International Corp. (SGI; formerly Rackable Systems, Inc.) was an American manufacturer of computer hardware and software, including high-performance computing systems, x86-based servers for datacenter deployment, and visualiza ...

, which was later purchased by

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States. HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the H ...

in 2016. All SGI hardware produced after 2007 is based on either

IA-64 IA-64 (Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented by Intel in coll ...

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mod ...

architecture, so it is incapable of running IRIX and is instead intended for

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version ...

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop compu ...

. HPE has not stated any plans for IRIX development or source code release.

Features

IRIX 6.5 is compliant with

Release 4,

UNIX 95 Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

, and

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

(including 1e/2c draft 15 ACLs and Capabilities). In the early 1990s, IRIX was a leader in Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), scalable from 1 to more than 1024 processors with a single system image. IRIX has strong support for real-time disk and graphics I/O. IRIX was widely used for the 1990s and 2000s, in the

computer animation Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating animations. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both static scenes (still images) and dynamic images (moving images), while computer animation refe ...

and

scientific visualization Scientific visualization ( also spelled scientific visualisation) is an interdisciplinary branch of science concerned with the visualization of scientific phenomena.Michael Friendly (2008)"Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, stat ...

industries due to its large application base and high performance. It still is relevant in a few legacy applications. IRIX is one of the first Unix versions to feature a

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

for the main desktop environment.

IRIX Interactive Desktop IRIX Interactive Desktop (formerly called Indigo Magic Desktop) is a desktop environment normally used as the default desktop on Silicon Graphics workstations running IRIX. The IRIX Interactive Desktop uses the Motif widget toolkit on top of the ...

uses the

X window manager An X window manager is a window manager that runs on top of the X Window System, a windowing system mainly used on Unix-like systems. Unlike MacOS Classic, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms (excepting Microsoft Windows explorer.exe shel ...

with a custom look designed using the Motif widget toolkit. IRIX is the originator of the industry standard

for graphics chips and Image processing libraries. IRIX uses the MIPSPro Compiler for both its front end and back end. The compiler, also known in earlier versions as IDO (IRIS Development Option) was released in many versions, many of which are coupled to the OS version. The last version was 7.4.4m, designed for 6.5.19 or later. The compiler is designed to support parallel

programming in C/C++, Fortran 77/90, and Ada. The Workshop GUI IDE is used for development. Other tools include Speedshop for performance tuning, and Performance Co-Pilot.

References

External links

Technical Publications Mirror

Silicon Bunny - IRIX software and information

IRIX Network - IRIX software, information, forums, and archive

Document Number: 007-2862-004 February 1999
Silicon Graphics User Group
{{DEFAULTSORT:Irix Discontinued operating systems MIPS operating systems UNIX System V

History

Features

See also

References

External links