Linux Reaches a Networked Multiuser Login Across Two Nodes of an Emulated SGI Origin 200

Four Processors, Two Cache-Coherent Nodes, and a Live Secure-Shell Daemon on a Machine Made of Software

THE MACHINE ROOM (August 27, 2026). The Origami project today announced that Linux boots to a networked multiuser login on an emulated SGI Origin 200 configured as a two-node, four-processor cache-coherent multiprocessor, brings up the machine’s ethernet, and answers a secure-shell connection over the network. The kernel is unmodified mainline Linux with the standard SGI IP27 option, running on -M origin200: the 1997 MIPS ccNUMA server this project emulates as a permanent fork of QEMU.

Unmodified Mainline, Not the Project’s Own Kernel

The kernel carries no patch from this project. It is mainline Linux with CONFIG_SGI_IP27, the in-tree support for the SN0 platform, built with the ordinary cross-compiler and rooted on a Gentoo userland written to a real emulated SCSI disk. That independence is the point. A guest the project wrote could be made to agree with a machine the project wrote by matching one mistake to another. A stock upstream kernel agrees only where the machine is actually right, which makes Linux a witness the project does not control.

Four Processors, Two Nodes, One Coherent Machine

The machine is built as two nodes, each a 180 MHz R10000-class processor pair with its own 128 MB of memory, joined into one cache-coherent address space, the non-uniform-memory design the Origin line was built to carry. The kernel finds all of it. It reports discovering four processors on two nodes, reads the internode distance matrix, brings up a primary and a secondary processor on each node, and runs its four processors under QEMU’s multi-threaded translator rather than a single round-robin thread. A process on one node writes a page of the other node’s memory and reads it back unchanged.

To a Login, and Onto the Network

From power-on the kernel reaches its multiuser login prompt in a little under fifteen minutes of host wall time. The base I/O controller’s ethernet comes up, the guest takes a DHCP lease, and its secure-shell daemon answers a connection forwarded from the host, returning its protocol banner over the emulated network. Each node’s board-identity part answers a serial number unique to that node, so the duplicate-serial retry storm that an earlier single-serial model provoked is gone.

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 a stock operating system booting across its nodes is strong evidence 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.