An Emulated SGI Origin 200 Passes SGI's Own Power-On Diagnostics

The Machine Now Satisfies the Factory Test Firmware and SGI’s Field Diagnostic Kernel, Two Witnesses This Project Did Not Write

THE MACHINE ROOM (August 27, 2026). The Origami project today announced that an emulated SGI Origin 200 passes the stock firmware’s factory power-on diagnostics with every check reporting success, and that SGI’s own field diagnostic kernel netboots on the same machine and runs its processor and memory tests without error. Both suites were written by SGI to qualify real hardware, and this project wrote neither and can edit neither, which is what makes a passing run worth announcing. The machine being tested is -M origin200, a 1997 MIPS ccNUMA server emulated as a permanent fork of QEMU.

Every Power-On Check, Cold and Warm

The stock IP27 PROM, the firmware an Origin 200 shipped with in 1998, runs a factory power-on diagnostic sequence before it will boot anything, and reports each result on the system console. On this machine that sequence now completes with every diagnostic passing, on a cold power-on and again on the warm reset that follows it, on a single 180 MHz R10000 processor with 64 MB of memory. Four diagnostics that this project had carried as known failures, the I/O controller’s serial-DMA test, its ethernet static-RAM parity test, and the SCSI adapter’s mailbox and DMA tests, now pass, and the standing list of expected failures the project kept against them is empty.

SGI’s Own Diagnostic Kernel, Netbooted and Run

Beyond the firmware’s built-in checks, SGI shipped a separate diagnostic operating system for its field engineers: a small kernel that boots in place of the vendor UNIX and exercises the hardware directly. That kernel, MDK version 1.6, now netboots on the emulated machine over ordinary user-mode networking. Its cache and memory tests run to completion on one processor. Its random-instruction generator, which builds streams of processor instructions, runs them, and compares the results against what the architecture requires, runs the vendor manual’s thousand-pass form on two processors and reports no miscompare.

Why a Passing Diagnostic Is the Sharpest Check

A test this project writes can only check what the project already understood well enough to write a test for. A test SGI wrote checks what SGI required of the silicon, including the corners nobody here thought to model. When one of those passes, it is evidence of a kind the project cannot manufacture for itself, and when one fails it points at a real gap rather than at a mistake in the test. The factory diagnostics and the field kernel are, in that sense, the same instrument the machine’s designers used, turned on a machine made of software.

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 diagnostics 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.