As of November 8, 2000 IRIX 6.5.10 is releasing with all new systems shipping from SGI worldwide manufacturing centers.

The IRIX 6.5.10 release contains updates for both the maintenance (6.5.10m) and feature (6.5.10f) streams. This release continues the focus on stability, reliability and compatibility required in the IRIX 6.5.X quarterly release process. Approximately 156 customer reported bugs are fixed in this release.

In addition to the bug fixes, the IRIX 6.5.10 maintenance path delivers several software enhancements and additional installation improvements. Since a major goal of the IRIX 6.5.X release process is to provide a feature stream as stable as the maintenance stream, the same bug fixes and software enhancements are also applied to the IRIX 6.5.10 feature path.

The general distribution process is through the online ordering system. IRIX 6.5.10m and 6.5.10f images are also available for download off Supportfolio.

Software Enhancements delivered by IRIX 6.5.10

Maintenance and Feature Stream:

• Support for point-to-point connections between the QLogic 2200 fibre channel controller and the Brocade switch. This type of connection lets the QLogic 2200 controller perform full duplex transfers with the switch offering a potential increase in bandwidth. This capability was enabled by changing the value assigned to the qlfc_use_connection_mode variable (in /var/sysgen/master.d/qlfc) to 2. The previous value was 0. This change does not impact loop operation.

• Support for the IRIX SCSI tape driver (TPSC) enhancements that let system administrators and privileged applications specify a persistent reservation on shared tape drives. After the reservation has been established, the shared tape drive cannot be accessed by another host until the reservation

• Support for the new Fortran, C++, and base compiler runtime libraries packaged under the ftn_eoe, c++_eoe and compiler_eoe overlay images. These libraries are based on the MIPSpro 7.3.1.2m compilers and contain new interfaces released under the MIPSpro 7.3 compilers. The libraries are backward compatible with the libraries that were released in previous versions of IRIX 6.5. For more information, see the ftn_eoe, c++_eoe, and compiler_eoe release notes.

Users are reminded to review the special "Caveats to Read Before You Upgrade" section of the online Start Here document. Visit the the "Caveat and Release Note Updates" for any late-breaking information.

IRIX 6.5.X Lookahead

IRIX 6.5.11 is in development and is tentatively planned to release mid-February, 2001