[Jacques]

Does anybody have a list of the best IRIX version to use with specific hardware? I know 6.5.22 is thrown around for compatibility with Nekoware but I for one appreciate the principle of marrying the leanest / most suitable OS to the most appropriate hardware. 

Eg. O2 - 6.3 - 6.5.8

[chatuser]

Here's a list of recommendations:

https://software.majix.org/irix/install-versions.shtml

[gijoe77]

I guess it really depends on what your doing or want to do. I just stick to either 6.5.22 or 6.5.30 for my general purpose systems because of compatibility with modernish software/compilers.

I have an Indigo2 Extreme I use as a COFF system and its running 5.3. I find 5.3 to be very fast and much snappier than 6.5, I also have a 6.3 disk for one my of o2's - it's pretty snappy - I didn't even realize it was 6.3 at first. I honestly was impressed how snappy a low end o2 "feels" under 6.3 and I might play with that some more in the future.

One thing that stood out to me regarding 5.3 vs 6.5 was I put a SCSI2SDv6 into my Indigo2 Extreme and created a SD boot disk for both 5.3 and 6.5 - 5.3 ran absolutely fine from the SD card. 6.5 ran like crap. I sort of took that as much more going on under the hood with 6.5 and illustrated perhaps its more lightweight for running on older hardware

[bjames]

Good question. When I put together my machines I generally referenced the sgi systems timeline to understand when the system was introduced and when it was discontinued and pick the latest release that is not too far past the end date of the system as a start. I have also found articles that indicate the last supported irix release for a specific system. But then again even if it’s the latest version for a particular system, it may run slow due to being too resource taxing. I on my Indy, but have wondered if 6.2or earlier would be faster, knowing it will run different applications from what I have installed now.

It would be nice to have a hardware agitator for each system on this forum.

[Jacques]

Well, having just spent a couple of days on 6.3 on my O2, I can heartily confirm it's by far the best associated OS to the hardware - up to R12k 270Mhz. Even a 180mhz R5K runs like a little champ on 256Mb of ram!