IRIX (Unix) Resources
As always check our page about How To Initiate a PARSEC Tech Support Call if you need immediate support. This page contains links and information concerning the Silicon Graphics (SGI) operating system known as IRIX.
IRIX Resources
In no particular order…
- Ian Mapleson's SGI Depot site with tons of resources
- here is an Excellent OSNews article on IRIX as an introduction.
- Slightly out of date page on procuring SGI hardware.
Getting System Information
IRIX generally gives us everything we need for support purposes by running the following commands.
$ uname -a $ hinv $ /usr/gfx/gfxinfo $ df -k
What We Support
Our support offering is simple. We'll help you with anything related to the IRIX operating system. We have experts here who have been IRIX users and admins since the beginning in the 1990's. Here are some examples of things we'd support.
- Setup and installation of IRIX (not always easy).
- Performance tuning and recommendations. Remember, you can't emulate IRIX. It's real hardware or no deal.
- Operating system problems or storage related issues with CXFS or XFS. We also provide operational support SGI logical volumes in XLV.
- Software setup and licensing issues with lmf
- User administration or Unix-related questions
- IRIX Kernel settings and tuning
PARSEC & IRIX
PARSEC provides OS support and consulting for IRIX systems. These are legacy machines from SGI made mostly in the 1990s and early 2000's. As most folks know, SGI went bankrupt and eventually offloaded all their intellectual property to a company called Rackable Systems. Rackable changed their name to Silicon Graphics directly afterwards. This was a bit of an invasion of the body snatchers, since Rackable seemed to have no interest in the SGI MIPS hardware or IRIX operating system. They let it die and failed to provide any glide path for IRIX users and system admins. After SGI spent the last few years of their life with an ex Microsoft executive who's idea of a future for SGI was Windows NT 4.0 (the Visual Workstation debacle), it was clear that Unix variants had no real future at SGI. Their failed Itanium based platforms ran Windows NT and Linux, but were short lived and badly performing. Only the MIPS hardware remains as evidence of the greatness they achieved in the 1990s culminating with the SGI Tezro and Origin 3000.
Parsec has no interest in Windows NT systems. Instead we support IRIX versions 6.2 and higher on SGI MIPS hardware.