IRIX^® 6.5.23 Release Announcement

As of February 4, 2004 IRIX® 6.5.23 is releasing with all new systems shipping from SGI worldwide manufacturing centers.

The IRIX 6.5.23 release continues the focus on stability, reliability, security and compatibility required in the IRIX® 6.5.xx quarterly release process.

The IRIX 6.5.23 release delivers several software enhancements, extensions and additional installation improvements as requested by our customers. Approximately 51 customer reported incidents are also resolved in this release.

The general distribution process is through the online ordering system. IRIX 6.5.23 images are also available for download off Supportfolio.

IRIX 6.5.23 Key New Features

Changes to Fonts, PostScript® Viewing, and PDF Viewing Tools
Several of the fonts have been updated in this 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 Applications that directly access those font files in the DPS directory, however, may find that the file has been superseded and no longer exists in that location.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.

Filesystems
Changes to CXFS™
As of IRIX® 6.5.22, the IRIX® CXFS™ software is distributed on a separately orderable CD.

IRIX 6.5.23 provides the following new features for CXFS:

• Support for both relocation and recovery to a standby (idle) server.
  Relocation is disabled by default.
• Support for a cluster of up to 64 nodes.
• The ability to define a reset method for a given node to one of the following:
  • Power cycle, to turn power off and on
  • Reset, to simulate the pressing of the reset button on the frontof the machine
  • NMI, to perform a nonmaskable interrupt

You can define this method using either the cmgr command or the GUI. You can manually perform a powercycle or an NMI with the cmgr command.

For information on these features, see CXFS Administration Guide for SGI InfiniteStorage.

Networking
SGI® Infinite Network Bandwidth
SGI Infinite Network Bandwidth aggregates a number of physical network interfaces into a single virtual interface that is able to spread data evenly across all the physical interfaces in a stripe set. This allows multiple packets to be sent and received in parallel. This greatly increases the available bandwidth to the virtual interface.

Dual-port Gigabit Ethernet board support
The IRIX 6.5.23 release supports the dual-port Gigabit Ethernet board. It is available in two formats:

• dual-port Fiber-Optic Gigabit Ethernet board
• dual-port Copper Gigabit Ethernet board

pthreads
Barriers and Spinlocks
IRIX 6.5.23 provides support for POSIX 1003.1j pthread barriers and spinlocks. Barriers provide a method of synchronizing multiple threads. Spinlocks are fast locking primitives that are operated on entirely in user space.

System profiling
IPv6 support for the rtmon command added
In IRIX 6.5.23, the rtmon-client and rtmond daemon support IPv6. rtmond is the server process that collects system and user events and dispatches them to clients such as padc, IRIXview™, and rtmon-client.

Support tools
Support for Embedded Support Partner 3.0
For the IRIX 6.5.23 release, the Embedded Support Partner (ESP) has been upgraded to version 3.0, the same version of Embedded Support Partner deployed on SGI's Altix™ Family of Servers and Superclusters.

The ESP2.0 event manager component has been decoupled and generalized to allow for more flexible system group management. An ESP3.0 System Group Manager (SGM) supports both ESP2.0 and ESP3.0 clients (Linux® or MIPS®). All existing ESP2.0 data will automatically be converted for use by ESP3.0.

SGI Software Product Life Cycle Management

IRIX support policy
In accordance with the SGI software product life cycle management strategy announced in November 2000, SGI will announce support mode changes for various software products on a quarterly basis. To view customer letters containing support mode changes announced since November 2000, as well as the latest IRIX Support Policy documents, visit the IRIX Support Policy Web page located at: http://support.sgi.com/irix/6.5

Changes to Support Mode Status
The following workstations, graphics and scalable server systems have transitioned to retired support mode for the IRIX 6.5.23 release. IRIX 6.5.23 does not support installation on these systems.

• Challenge® S, Challenge® M, Challenge® DM, Challenge® L, Challenge® XL
• Indigo®, Indigo2™, Indigo2 Extreme, Indigo2 Impact™
• Indy®
• Power Challenge™, Power Indigo2™, Power Onyx™
• Onyx®

The following product has transitioned to retired support for the IRIX 6.5.23 release:

• Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) / Distributed File System (DFS)

Contact your local sales representative to discuss options for replacement or upgrade products.

IRIX 6.5 Application Compatibility Mandate

For those providers asking about quarterly recertification of applications, please take a moment and become acquainted with the application compatibility protections offered by IRIX 6.5. This is a very powerful mandate that allows an application to be developed under IRIX 6.5.X and be run on any IRIX 6.5.Y, regardless of whether Y > X, Y == X, or Y < X.

The Mandate of Application Compatibility in SGI IRIX 6.5 is at: http://techpubs.sgi.com/tpl.cgi/view/SGI_Developer/mandate_IRIX

Caveats to Read Before You Upgrade

Users are reminded to review the special "Caveats to Read Before You Upgrade" section of the online Welcome document. Visit the "Caveat and Release Note Updates" link at: http://support.sgi.com/irix/6.5 for any late-breaking information.

Important note if you do live installs of the IRIX quarterly releases

Installation
Updated Inst program
New installation features were used starting with IRIX 6.5.21 that necessitate an updated version of the Inst program. If you plan to install using the miniroot, then you may do so by the usual method. However, if you plan to upgrade by 'live' install and are running IRIX 6.5.19 or earlier, you must first install patch 5086.

IRIX 6.5.xx Lookahead

The 6th anniversary of the IRIX quarterly releases, IRIX 6.5.24, is in development and is planned to release mid-May, 2004.