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Is IRIX experiencing a hobbyist revival or something? This is the second IRIX reference I’ve seen on here in the past two days, and there was a submission a day or two ago (c.f. a Voodoo video card?) as well. I haven’t personally encountered IRIX in the wild since a company I worked at in 2003. I suppose SGI has always had a cool factor but it’s unusual seeing it come up in a cluster of mentions like this.

by unxmaal10 hours ago|

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It ebbs and flows.

SGUG tried hard to port newer packages for IRIX for several years but hit a wall with ABI mismatches leading to GOT corruption. This prevented a lot of larger packages from working or even building.

I picked up the effort again after wondering if LLMs would help. I ran into the ABI problems pretty quickly. This time though, I had Claude use Ghidra to RE the IRIX runtime linker daemon, which gave the LLM enough to understand that the memory structures I’d been using in LLVM were all wrong. See https://github.com/unxmaal/mogrix/blob/main/rules/methods/ir... .

After cracking that mystery I was able to quickly get “impossible” packages building, like WebKit, QT5, and even small bits of Go and Rust.

I’m optimistic that we’ll see more useful applications built for this cool old OS.

by bartread10 hours ago|

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That is pretty neat. I guess this sort of unlocking and unblocking effort is exactly what’s needed for a revival.

I’m sort of thinking of AmigaOS/Workbench as well although, perhaps because of what I would assume was always a much larger user base than SGI had, it maybe never went away like SGI and IRIX did.

It is great seeing these old platforms get a new lease of life.

by speed_spread10 hours ago|

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Ooh that's super interesting. I assume you shared the recipe with the irix community? I remember keeping Netscape up to date on my Indy was already a struggle in 2002.

by vintagedave8 hours ago|

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I'd love to read a blog post on porting back to Irix!