Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

IRIX 7 documentation

IRIX 7 is a clean-room, GPL-3.0, Rust-native operating system that runs existing IRIX 6.5 application binaries through a legacy ABI layer. It inherits the IRIX 6.5 compatibility mandate without forward compatibility. The first hardware target is the SGI Indy; x86_64 PCs and KVM/VirtIO cloud machines follow. The architecture target is one logical computer built from 1–128 kernel replicas: a native shim per node and the same Wasm core on every node, with a global object/capability namespace and an asynchronous fabric.

The current bring-up is smaller: the native Indy ROM/kernel and a static Rust std image run, while the Wasm/mesh crates are host-tested and the kernel has not yet joined a mesh. See Current status.

Explore the roadmap: The Tree of IRIX 7 is an interactive view of the native track. The active sequencing is in plan/milestones.md.

Start here:

  • Install guide — build from source, run in the iris emulator, run tests.
  • System architecture — the 1–128-node logical computer.
  • Milestone plan — phases, M1–M4 gates, compatibility and rollback.
  • Project map — the destination, decisions and scope.
  • Architecture — the native and compatibility layers.
  • Plan — milestones, GitHub, risks, interfaces, hardware, testing, security, release, legal, community and cost.
  • Research — the evidence base.

The docs are built with mdBook and published to GitHub Pages.

Current status

The replacement ROM and n32 kernel boot on iris. The kernel owns the machine, brings up Seeq networking, DHCP/DNS/NTP, HTTP/HTTPS, the boot-log display, the telnet console and HTTPS module autoload, then enters a static Rust std image from SCSI target 2. That image exercises args, time, sleep, a small read/write ramfs, stat, read_dir, chdir and relative paths through a provisional syscall ABI and a 42-symbol C shim.

The architecture foundation is merged: sys-primitives, mesh-core, mesh-service, fabric, guest-abi, cas-core, cas-store, cap-engine, agnostic-core, mesh-sim and a host-only wasm-host prototype. The kernel now initialises the one-node membership view; it does not yet run the Wasm core or join a mesh.

The relibc n32 big-endian Linux/QEMU gate has passed (TLS, setjmp, pthreads). A provisional IRIX PAL scaffold builds and links C probes but has not been booted on IRIX 7; the kernel error channel, TLS and stat ABI remain open. There is no process table, real threads/TLS, posix_spawn, signal delivery, termios or socket API yet. See install.md, plan/milestones.md and research/std-hello-bringup.md.