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by oppositelock
1112 days ago
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A completely disagree with you on IRIX. I'm biased, because I did work with IRIX at SGI and I did in fact touch some kernel code as well. What I miss from IRIX, that no other system has yet replicated:
1) Realtime mode. RTLinux doesn't count. In IRIX, you could run your own code at a higher priority than the scheduler itself (this was called hard realtime), and you'd give it time slices when you could, or a core or two.
2) Frame scheduling. When rendering 3D, you could have the scheduler connected to the monitor refresh rate to make you less likely to miss a frame boundary. Yes, Motif was very plain, and X11 was a hot mess to work with, but the thing had capabilities which are still hard to find. |
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FWIW, SGI didn't seem to agree.
From SGI's own whitepaper: "In addition, REACT for Linux adds unique capabilities including sgi-shield and kbar that were not available on IRIX. The Linux based platform delivers better real-time performance than SGI Origin running IRIX with realtime extensions: 30µs guaranteed interrupt response time versus 50µs for Origin."
https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/565/463/operating_syst...
Without REACT extensions, Irix realtime facilities aren't any different than the scheduling policies of Linux (this is akin to bypassing the normal scheduler).
https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/IRIX/man5/realtime.5.html.
I have a soft spot for Irix from the early 90s, and it had some clever accomodations for the technology at the time, but things have moved on and advanced.