®
As of February 7, 2001 IRIX 6.5.11 is releasing with all new systems
shipping from SGI worldwide manufacturing centers.
The IRIX 6.5.11 release contains updates for both the maintenance (6.5.11m)
and feature (6.5.11f) streams. This release continues the focus on stability,
reliability and compatibility required in the IRIX 6.5.X quarterly release
process. Approximately 128 customer reported incidents are fixed in this
release.
In addition to the bug fixes, the IRIX 6.5.11 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 6.5.11 feature path.
The general distribution process is through the online ordering system. IRIX
6.5.11m and 6.5.11f images are also available for download off Supportfolio.
Maintenance and Feature Stream:
- Support for the use of a reserved area of memory; this reserved area
is between virtual addresses 0x30000000 and 0x40000000. This feature
disables the reserved area of memory that the kernel provides for
applications to place their mmap and shmat mappings. For more information,
see the mmap(2), shmat(2), syssgi(2), and sgi_use_anyaddr(1) man pages.
- Support for weightless pthreads; they allow you to lower the priority
of a process by using the npri -w command. For more information, see
the npri(1) man page.
- Support for upgrading license_eoe to the FLEXlm 7.1 release from
Globetrotter Software, Inc. The license manager daemon will be built
in V5 compatibility mode. For more information, see the FLEXlm End
User Manual and the associated man pages.
- Support for an increased maximum number of logical unit numbers (LUNs)
in the SCSI infrastructure from 64 to 255. This change impacts only the
fcadp and qlfc fibre channel drivers and they will now enforce this LUN
limit. If a LUN is greater than 255, it will be ignored after issuing a
message to this effect. If you use large numbers of LUNs, you can exhaust
the hardware graph. You may need to use the systune command to increase the
hwgraph_num_dev parameter to let the kernel build larger hardware graphs.
- Support for licensing of partitioned environments. The SGI Origin 3000
server series and SGI Onyx 3000 series of systems give you the flexibility
to distribute and manage a partitioned system environment on a large CPU
server system. In most cases, software licensing behaves in the same manner
on a single system image as in a partitioned environment. However, there
are some differences. Depending on your applications, you may need either
systemwide or per-CPU licensing. For more information, see IRIX Admin:
Software Installation and Licensing.
- Support for the PCI Hot Plug infrastructure on the SGI 3200, SGI 3400, and
SGI 3800 servers. The Hot Plug feature consists of the Hot Insertion and
Hot Removal actions. Each device driver must be qualified as supporting
one or both of these actions. Currently, the QLogic fibre channel and
QLogic SCSI device drivers are qualified for Hot Insertion. For more
information on specific administrative options, see the pciconfig(1)
man page.
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" link at http://support.sgi.com/6.5/caveat_updates.html
for any late-breaking information.
IRIX 6.5.12 is in development and is planned to release mid-May, 2001
