IRIX 6.5.30 Boots and Runs on an Emulated SGI Origin 200

The Vendor Operating System This Project Was Built Toward Now Executes on Paper Silicon

THE MACHINE ROOM (August 27, 2026). The Origami project today announced that the IRIX 6.5.30 installation kernel boots and runs on an emulated SGI Origin 200, bringing up a live console and executing past the point where every earlier attempt went dark. IRIX is SGI’s own 64-bit UNIX, and running it is the result this emulator has been built toward since it first printed a firmware banner.

The Origin 200 is a 1997 MIPS/IRIX ccNUMA server. Until this project, no emulator had run any SGI Origin at all, not to an operating system, not to a firmware banner. The machine being emulated is -M origin200: a 180 MHz R10000-class processor, the SN0 node controller and its crosstalk fabric, the Bridge I/O controller with its 1997-vintage IOMMU, and the base I/O chip that carries the serial console, ethernet, and SCSI. IRIX 6.5.30 is the final release of the platform.

Unmodified, Over Ordinary Networking

The kernel is the stock vendor miniroot, netbooted over QEMU’s ordinary user-mode networking with no special host configuration. The emulated firmware fetches it, the kernel enters, and it runs. The miniroot’s own console comes up live and the boot proceeds under a real console session rather than into silence.

The kernel also raises no complaint about the machine it finds. It reaches its banner with no processor-downrev warning, no node-controller-downrev warning, and no old-firmware warning, the three ways the vendor kernel announces that it is running on hardware older or lesser than it expects. Silencing the last of those was itself a result: the kernel derives its old-firmware verdict not from a version number but from a specific node-controller status the model now presents correctly. So the machine is not merely tolerated by IRIX. It is read as current hardware.

Four Walls, Each Named

Reaching a running kernel meant clearing four distinct failures, each understood before it was fixed rather than papered over:

The console appeared dead because the kernel relocated its console session onto a serial port that had no backend in the harness, a harness gap, not a device fault. The I/O controller’s PCI configuration space returned the wrong reset values, which a diagnostic caught. The directly connected Bridge faulted a storm of data-bus errors because it answered at only two crosstalk widget addresses instead of the full set a single-bridge Origin 200 presents. And the kernel’s first per-processor-data store took a bus error at a node that does not exist, because the processor model carried the R10000’s FrameMask register but never applied it, so two of the kernel’s own page-table flags reached the top of a physical address and named a phantom node. Each fix landed with a register-level test that pins the corrected behavior.

About This Project

Origami is a permanent fork of QEMU that emulates the SGI Origin 200. It exists because nothing else emulated the machine, and because SGI’s firmware and IRIX are the strongest available witness that the model is faithful. It ships nothing and sells nothing. It is a research and preservation project, unaffiliated with Silicon Graphics.

SGI, IRIX, Origin, MIPS, and R10000 are trademarks of their respective owners, and this project is unaffiliated with any of them. No SGI code is reproduced in the fork.