Key New Features and Changes

The goal of the IRIX 6.5 release family is to provide a high quality and stable operating system for all SGI systems. Significant additional software has been packaged with IRIX 6.5, including some important system and network management and interoperability tools.

This page contains a partial list of the key new features and changes for IRIX 6.5.30. To see the list of key features and changes for the IRIX 6.5 and IRIX 6.5.1 through 6.5.29 releases, see the previous IRIX features page.

For information about supported hardware and peripherals in IRIX 6.5.30, see the Minimum Requirements page.

Look for information about the IRIX 6.5 release family on Supportfolio Online (http://support.sgi.com/irix/6.5) and http://www.sgi.com.

For details on any of these new features and changes, refer to the release notes.

Note: Some features listed here apply only for certain software bundles or hardware configurations.

Packaging and Support Changes for IRIX 6.5.30

  • CXFS Support

    CXFS is supported with IRIX 6.5.30 as an asynchronous product. The CXFS release for IRIX 6.5.30 must be ordered separately. For more information, consult your SGI service representative.

    For information on which CXFS release is compatible with which IRIX release see the CXFS MultiOS Compatibility Chart on Supportfolio Online at: https://support.sgi.com/content_request/139840/index.html

  • Changes to Fonts, PostScript(TM) Viewing, and PDF Viewing Tools

    Several of the fonts were updated for the IRIX 6.5.23 release, and as a result, customers may notice a change in some of the filenames used in the font directories. You may also see some minor changes to the fonts' appearance on the display. Applications that use fonts through the standard mechanisms in X11 should continue to operate correctly. Applications that directly access those font files in the DPS directory, however, may find that the file has been superseded and no longer exists in that location. Developers are encouraged to use the standard X11 mechanisms for accessing fonts to avoid this problem.

    The tools acroread (Adobe Acrobat® Reader), xpsview, and showps have been replaced with the more recent open source tools gsview and xpdf, which are built on top of the Ghostscript® package. These tools can be found on the Applications CD in this release. Customers who made use of the old tools should ensure that they install the new ones by selecting the images for gsview, xpdf, and ghostscript from the Applications CD. The old tools will no longer be available, and will be replaced with wrapper scripts.

    The wrappers for acroread and xpsview/showps will invoke the new xpdf or gsview commands respectively, but the wrapper scripts will pass all parameters verbatim, and will not attempt any translation. Thus, if an option changes or is not available for the new tool, customers may encounter an error if they use that option with the old command name from inside a script, for instance.

    Ghostscript is a registered trademark of Artifex Software, Inc. PostScript is a trademark and Acrobat is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated.

IRIX 6.5.30 Key New Features

The following changes have been incorporated into the core IRIX 6.5.30 overlay CDs and the Applications CD.

New Software Enhancements

  • GRIO updates
    The IRIX 6.5.30 release includes the following for Guaranteed-Rate I/O version 2 (GRIOv2):

    • An extension to the node-level bandwidth allocation, which now has two options:

      • The node receives at most (ceiling) the configured bandwidth (previous behavior)

      • The node receives at least (floor) the configured bandwidth (new)

    • The following changes for ggd2:

      • Clarification that the -m option sets per-volume minimum distributed bandwidth allocator (DBA)

      • The new -s option, which sets per-node minimum DBA

      • The new -u option, which specifies the DBA update interval

  • Support for STK T10000A tape drives in mt(1) and hinv(1M) commands
    For the IRIX 6.5.30 release, the mt(1) and hinv(1M) commands have been updated to display the correct drive type for STK T1000A tape drives, which are supported with APD release 2.12. Without this update, the drive type for an STK Titanium drive with an mt status command would display as "Async Personality Device" and the hinv command would show the drive type as unknown.

  • Secure version of Array Services
    A secure version of Array Services that is built to make use of secure sockets layer (SSL) and secure shell (SSH) is available with the IRIX 6.5.30 release. The "Array Services" chapter of IRIX Admin: Resource Administration has been updated with information about how to install and use Secure Array Services and describes differences between standard Array Services (arraysvcs) and Secure Array Services (sarraysvcs).

  • Support for changes to Daylight Saving Time
    As of the IRIX 6.5.30 release, the IRIX operating system accounts for changes to Daylight Savings Time in accordance with the amendments to the Uniform Time Act that will take affect in 2007. Starting in 2007, clocks will be set ahead one hour on the second Sunday of March instead of the first Sunday of April. Clocks will be set back one hour on the first Sunday in November rather than the last Sunday of October.

    IRIX 6.5.30 also accounts for changes to Australian Daylight Savings time, in which the end of Daylight Savings Time is extended by one week in 2006 and returns to the last Sunday in March in 2007 and thereafter.

  • New -o argument to nsmount(1M) command
    The nsmount(1M) now accepts the -o argument to control options for nfs(4) protocol used to communicate to nsd(1M). See the nsmount(1M) and nsd(1M) man pages for details.

  • Greater accuracy of shared memory usage measurement in job limits
    For the IRIX 6.5.30 release, the job limits code was modified to improve the accuracy of the measurement of shared memory usage within a job. Within the job limits parameters this is called the physmem (physical memory) limit. The new change will not only count the physical memory usage accurately, but in cases where a job container has multiple processes running which share memory space, the physmem calculation will proportion the shared memory usage across the processes involved.

  • Changes to in-core extent list
    The IRIX 6.5.30 release includes new parameters to xfs_bmapi() and xfs_bunmapi() to have them report the range spanned by modifications to the in-core extent map. The release also includes XFS_BUNMAPI() and XFS_SWAP_EXTENTS() macros that call xfs_bunmapi() and xfs_swap_extents() via the ioops vector. All calls that may modify the in-core extent map for the data fork to go through the ioops vector have been changed. This allows a cache of extent map data to be kept in sync.

SGI Software Product Life Cycle Management

In accordance with the SGI software product life cycle management strategy announced in December 2002, SGI will announce support mode changes for various software products on a semiannual basis. To view customer letters containing support mode changes announced since December 2002, as well as the latest IRIX Support Policy documents, visit the IRIX Support Policy Web page on Supportfolio Online.

IRIX OS Bundled Software

For information about the bundled software that is included on the Applications CD with this release, see CD Contents and the Bundled software and licenses web page.

System Platform Bundles

No changes have been made to the demonstration software CDs developed for the specific system platforms.

Freeware

Freeware products and revisions supported for this release can be downloaded from http://freeware.sgi.com/. As of the IRIX 6.5.22 release, IRIX Freeware CDs are no longer included with the IRIX Update kit.

Documentation

The following manuals have been revised for this release:

  • Guaranteed-Rate I/O Version 2 Guide (007-4244-002) has been updated to include documentation for the new extension to the node-level bandwidth allocation and changes for ggd2.

  • IRIX Admin: Resource Administration (007-3700-016) has been updated with information about how to install and use Secure Array Services and describes differences between standard Array Services (arraysvcs) and Secure Array Services (sarraysvcs).