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IRIX 6.5.21
New Hardware Platforms
SGI® Origin® 350 Support for the SGI Origin 350 server, an upgrade to the SGI® Origin® 300 series, is included in IRIX 6.5.21. This includes support for the Origin 350 Base Module in 2, 4, and 8 processor sizes. With the addition of a NUMAlink Module the Origin 350 scales up to 32 processors.
Silicon Graphics® Onyx4™ UltimateVision™ The IRIX 6.5.21 release supports the Silicon Graphics Onyx4 UltimateVision visualization system. Onyx4 supports the following features:
- Floating-point pixel precision in the shading engine
- Programmable vertex and fragment engines
- Hardware acceleration for up to eight lights
- 256MB DDR SDRAM on-board graphics memory
- 2D engine with 128-bit data path
- Up to 2.4GB bilinear filtered pixels per second
- Up to 300 million transformed, clipped, and lit triangles per second (peak rate)
- Up to eight pipes
- A frame-buffer interface providing memory bandwidth of 20GB per second
- Acceleration for 16-bit and 32-bit RGBA modes
- 2D display lists and local memory vertex list execution
- Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic texturing
- Projective texture, 3D texture, and video texture support
- Dual channel
- Quad-buffered stereo
- Full-scene anti-aliasing
- Overlay visuals
IRIX 6.5.21 Feature Stream Enhancements
Filesystems
XVM show command output improved The output to the XVM show command now indicates whether an XVM physical volume (physvol) has no physical connection to the system. This indicates that an I/O error would be returned when trying to read or write anywhere on the volume.
Important!
If one live-installs IRIX 6.5.21 on an Octane without applying patch 5086, it will kill the PROM, rendering you unable to boot the Octane anymore! Be absolutely sure that you have patch 5086 installed on your Octane, if you want to upgrade to 6.5.21.
A miniroot 6.5.21 install should be fine, provided you boot the miniroot from the 6.5.21 install CD.
IRIX 6.5.21 Maintenance and Feature Stream Enhancements
Resource management
cpuset support for memory-only nodes In an SGI® Origin® 3900 system, a Cx-brick contains node boards without CPU packages or cache; these are referred to as a memory-only nodes. The Cx-brick is a "super" CPU brick. It contains multiple node cards. One of those node cards must be a CPU node, but any of the other nodes can be memory-only nodes. Memory-only nodes, sometimes called headless nodes, allow you to expand the memory capabilities of your system without the cost or overhead of adding unnecessary additional processors.
Kernel threads run in the boot cpuset by default Boot cpusets are used to constrain regular system activities to a subset of the available CPUs. In IRIX 6.5.21, kernel threads not forced to run on specific CPUs run within the boot cpuset if one exists. Boot cpusets are used to constrain regular system activities to a subset of the available CPUs.
Network programming
Support for tcp_wrappers package The tcp_wrappers package is available in the eoe.sw.base IRIX subsystem. It consists of the following components: A library in /usr/lib/libwrap.so A header file in /usr/include/tcpd.h A suite of programs to verify tcp_wrappers operation: tcpdchk, tcpdmatch, and try-from In IRIX 6.5.21, inetd(1m) is built with tcp_wrappers by default.
Checkpoint and restart
New PLACEMENT policy for checkpoint and restart processes The IRIX 6.5.21 release provides a new PLACEMENT policy keyword for checkpoint and restart processes. Action keywords will restore the memory of process(es) according to the placement policies saved at the time of checkpoint or attempt to place process memory according to a basic memory placement algorithm.
Digital media
Support for M-Audio Revolution on SGI Octane and SGI Octane2.
IRIX 6.5.21 includes support for the M-Audio Revolution PCI audio card on Octane and Octane2 systems.
OS maintainability
New sysdump command functionality The sysdump command, first added in IRIX 6.5.19, has been enhanced to generate level 1 system crash dump files of a running system. The sysdump command is used by system administrators to generate a crash dump file of the operating system without the need to reboot the system.
System performance and tuning
New low overhead pthread mutex protocol IRIX 6.5.21 provides support for the thread and system nonpreemption pthread mutex protocols that let real-time pthreads avoid being preempted while in critical sections. Real-time developers would use this feature when the priority inheritance and priority ceiling mutexes incur too much overhead.
Security
OpenLDAP upgraded to version 2.1.17. For information on OpenLDAP, see http://www.openldap.org/. OpenSSH upgraded to version 3.6.1p2. For information on OpenSSH, see http://www.openssh.com/.
OpenSSL upgraded to version 0.9.7b. For information on OpenSSL, see http://www.openssl.org/.
USB peripherals
IRIX 6.5.21 includes support for USB tablets.
NFS
NFS Access control enhancements The NFS Access control mechanism has been updated to support new access control list elements such as IP netmasks, domain name suffixes, and explicit exclusion of a host or group of hosts.
Trusted IRIX™
Updates to Trusted IRIX administration A user must have the same or a subset of the Mandatory Integrity (MINT) divisions of an object. The integrity divisions of the user must be the same or a subset of the integrity divisions of the object (or file).
Filesystems
Write-capable UDF filesystem format Universal Disk Format (UDF) is the filesystem used on DVDs. The UDF specifications are produced by OSTA, and are based on the ECMA-167 specification. A read-only implementation of UDF was added to IRIX® 6.5.18, and a write-capable version was added for IRIX® 6.5.20.