OSNews

Sad day for the tecnology world.Another cool company with cool products converted in only another linux reseller

Oh, does it have more to do with Intel?

An open source IRIX would be great. There are still a lot of SGI fans who really love their machines and the whole IRIX system. And there are still a lot of high-end applications available for it. Even if software is obsolete compared to other current systems, it should never go to waste, because you never know who might benefit and do something interesting with it.

Wait a minute... didn't everybody knew about this already...?

...didn't everyone know it would come to this (and that it had, in fact, already happened)?

"What kept them?"

Seriously, as several people have said, this was obviously on the cards. IRIX hasn't had an update in *ages*.

For some nostalgia, you can make KDE look like an IRIX system if you go into the "Style," "Window Decorations" and "Colours" dialogue boxes and choose the right options.

I guess this makes my O2's and my Octane collectors items.

Just an FYI, OpenBSD runs very well on an O2.

Just goes to show, if Linux is gaining any ground, it is mostly at the expense of Unix. Like the Greek gods, the son replaces the father. Perhaps ReactOS will will fare better as a Windows replacement.

Not to say no one switches from Windows to Linux (I did for one) but it's just taken more seriously as a server OS right now, with which its price, sets it up to slowly replace its inspiration. I've mixed feelings there, I wouldn't have tried out a Unix-like environment without Linux and I never had a stake in Unix, emotionally or otherwise, but it's somehow a shame each time a branch thereof fades out.

Did that article summary just state that Itanic was a more common architecture than MIPS?!

I guess there's no point in keeping on a workforce to maintain IRIX when they can use Linux for free.

Didn't IBM massively cut its AIX workforce when they moved to Linux so as to take advantage of the free labor that produces Linux? A corp can save money by using free Linux rather than paying programmers to maintain some proprietary Unix.

I think that now there is nothing special about SGI. No more powerful and *different* workstations. May be the age of the powerful Unix workstation is finished, may be.

SGI should release IRIX as open source, at least the code that can be released without problems. Can be a good starting point to maybe "FreeIRIX" or "OpenIRIX" :the first multimedia-aimed free UNIX clone.

The decadence of SGI seems to be unstoppable. They will die, I think.

Edited 2006-09-05 21:33

they moved from one dead hardware platform to another? i liked sgi and irix its a shame they moved to itanium with linux.

Linux is gaining over Unices not developed anymore. That's true. But c'mon it's not advancing over Solaris, or HPUX, and the battle against Windows servers is going hard. Not to talk about desktops, where the base of Linux is minimal.

This is sad to hear,but not any news. This has been known for long and reported several months ago.

Anyway,Why, Irix is one of the most stable OS:es in the world and works great. Why not open source Irix and port it to x86 instead.

I am pretty fed up with all linux talk all the time. We sell and configure and use linux, solaris, osX and irix and even if i do like Linux, not everything has to be linux, i do prefer Solaris and irix.

Unfortunately I'm not happy because linux is replacing IriX, quite the opposite, actually. Linux should be replacing some bad/insecure OS, which Irix is not.

Less choice is always bad. Linux world domination? Ah! That could only be a horrible future.

It's a sad day for CPU enthusiasts.
I don't think they'll open-source IRIX, but the good news is that MIPS-based workstations will get a lot cheaper (at least for a while) on eBay.

IRIX xfs produces the lowest I/O Wait time on Linux Distros than any of ext2/3 or Reiserfs or Reiser4.

I've tried it on Mandriva 2006 with all available kind of file systems

with xfs: copying concurrently 4 folders each with 500MB that includes small and large amount of files took 10% of CPU
and thus I was able to start other programs and use them

while on all other linux file systems it made the CPU at 100% and almost froze the system

I have confirmed this behavior on all distros

Then I did a very demanding test to see xfs power:
1. copy CDROM to disk
2. copy 12 instances of the previous folder internally to 12 different locations at the same time
3. transfer 17 GB over gigabit ethernet
4. open openoffice2 and opera9 and mozilla firefox1.5.0.2 at the same time
5. Run glxgears to obtain maximum GPU usage

and CPU was at 50% onlyyyyyyy.
Of course I have tried all kind of kernel updates (20 of them) to execlude the kernel as the source of high I/O wait times on linux with ext3/reiserfs.
I also have tested JFS of IMB AIX 5L to see how good it is, but it didn't hold a candle to xfs though was better than both ext3 and ReiserFS.

So this showed me that what we really need is not just another Unix but just an old linux with proper file system and device drivers will make the distro rock, and maybe then will linux gain serious footsteps towards market share. And thus SGI decision is perfect for them and for us.

I don't know much about IRIX but I do know MIPS Assembly. It's a shame that they had to drop MIPS in favor of Itanium. I suppose that the ease of use didn't translate into as much performance and almost everybody does their system programming in C nowadays anyway.

I think IRIX died in 1999 when sgi started producing NT Workstations and sold tons of OpenGL patents to nVIDIA and Microsoft (Direct3D). There was a myth floating around about IRIX 7 (a port of IRIX to Itanium), around '99-00, but ultimately sgi decided to go with Linux on Itanium, rather than rewrite IRIX.

A friend of mine has been working on an sgi history and info page. It's still in a very precocious stage, but gives a lot of info on IRIX.

http://bama.ua.edu/~dodso003/irixinfo.html

Edited 2006-09-06 04:57

Where is the city of Bergen? in which county?

In The Netherlands we have a city of Bergen as well, about 8 km from my hometown .

Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320)

The Itanium is not the common Intel x86 architechture, it's a whole different thing.

Always been my favorite linux fs, maybe now we'll get xfs_shrink too someday.

They did this once already with NT and intel didn't they? Will linux fare any better?

Always had a soft spot for IRIX, one of the better unii.

Itanic is "common" compared to MIPS?

MIPS is embedded all over the place. in millions of end systems. You've been duped by the billions of marketing dollars spent by Intel and HP, to make you think that Itanic is a ubiquitous chip and is deployed everywhere. The awful truth is that they were just trying to appease shareholders who have seen US $10B in Itanic spending go down the drain.

Ironically, Itanic is the very chip that took SGI down when they latched on to it. Now that IRIX is gone, what do they have left? Linux on Itanic? Why in the world would I want that?