Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

The SimOS site seems to have been down for a time ( http://simos.stanford.edu )

www.vmware.com

¿Do they have any product capable of running IRIX like SimOS?

I guess my joke was lame. The guys behind simos were the team which started vmware.

BTW, I believe you needed a modified version of Irix to run on simos.

I didn't know this. Don't worry!

IIRC, SimOs was specifically for IRIX 5.3 and it could very well be that the kernel had to be modified as well. I have the SimOS stuff on my computer as a leftover from a research project a couple years ago, and I should dig out the research notes from that time to be exact.

I have entered into a non-commercial license agreement with Stanford for SimOs, and I have just reveiwed that to see in how far I can share anything. The license doesn't specifically mention distribution, only use, so I feel I can't share this. (Sorry)

edit:
If it is running virtualised IRIX you are after, why not start a nice little open source project starting off with Virtual Box sources?

Yeah, the "hardware" is absolutely nothing like any SGI. It implements a MAGIC (Memory and General Interconnect Chip) chipset which was designed at stanford. The only devices it has are ethernet, scsi disk, RTC and character console (no graphics at all). Even the MIPS chip is strange in places (I remember the code that uses the config register and does FPU detection needing SimOS specific hacks), and the FPU itself is more like that on an R3k model. And on the 32-bit SimOS version, special instructions were added to access the MAGIC chipset (which is 64-bit only) using 64-bit reads and writes - these take the source/destination as two 32-bit registers, which is very strange for a RISC. So SimOS can only be used for the IRIX 5.3 kernel that was ported and distributed by Stanford, or a version of 6.4 that was ported but they never had permission to release.

Its also painfully slow to run IRIX5.3 using SimOS (on an O2 350MHz 1Gb machine). I forget which CPU model I used though, perhaps it wasnt the fastest one available.

It would be a really interesting project indeed, but I believe it wouldn't be legal to use it unless the host hardware is SGI. Even if the user owns an SGI computer, it's not legal to install IRIX outside of the computer that IRIX was shipped with.

Yeah, a year has passed from the last post, but still, perhaps, it'll be helpful for somebody:

ftp://ftp.akaedu.org/ 嵌入式硬件设计资源_Hardware/嵌入式微处理器_CPU/龙芯资料_Godson/SimOS/original/

For IRIX it required a customized kernel which Stanford couldn't distribute, so it never was useful unless you had an IRIX source license and access to the SimOS modifications.

The license on the Stanford page just made you click some button to indicate you agreed to Stanford & SGI's distribution terms, and that you had IRIX 5.3 already, and then it led you to the download links (including the modified IRIX 5.3 kernel). You needed the CD to build a filesystem disk image to use (in conjunction with the modified kernel distributed by Stanford). Only the IRIX 6.4 kernel was never released publically, because that was the current version of IRIX at the time.

EDIT: Here is the main part of the agreement. The registration form it mentions in clause (ii) was the web page you had to fill out and agree to. I guess since that is gone, there is no official and legal way to get IRIX 5.3 for SimOS any more.


It was a similar story with Digital UNIX 4 for SimOS - DEC/Compaq just made you request it, and then sent you ftp links for the distribution, and also for a prebuilt 1Gb file system image. There was an AIX version available for download as well (for the SimOS-PPC fork) at some University in Texas.