Press Releases
OpenBSD Reaches a Multiuser Root Login on an Emulated SGI Origin 200
OpenBSD 6.9 installs to a disk and boots to a root login on the emulated Origin 200, the first OS to run on any emulated SGI Origin.
A Real Installer Writes a Disk Through the Modelled SCSI Path, and the Installed Kernel Boots Off It to an Authenticated Shell
THE MACHINE ROOM (August 11, 2026). The Origami project today announced that OpenBSD/sgi 6.9 GENERIC-IP27 installs to a disk and boots to an authenticated root login on an emulated SGI Origin 200, the first time any emulated SGI Origin has run a general-purpose operating system through to a multiuser shell. A real OpenBSD installer wrote its distribution sets to a SCSI disk through the project’s modelled QLogic ISP1040 host adapter. The kernel it installed then booted off that disk, mounted root, authenticated a user, ran commands against the filesystem, and halted cleanly.
The claim is anchored, not asserted: a survey of every SGI emulator in existence, run at the start of this project, found MAME with no IP27 code of any kind, GXemul with a machine name and a serial port inherited from a different SGI machine, and QEMU with no SGI machine and no R10000-class processor. None had run an Origin, not to an operating system, not to a firmware banner.
A Machine Built From a Reviewed Contract
The Origin 200 is a 1997 cache-coherent non-uniform-memory-access server, exotic when it shipped.
The emulated machine is -M origin200: a 180 MHz MIPS R10000-class processor, the SN0 node
controller, one chip that is the memory controller, the directory-coherence engine, the interrupt
controller, and the node’s port onto the crosstalk fabric, a crosstalk-to-PCI Bridge with its own
1997-vintage address-translation IOMMU, two QLogic ISP1040 SCSI adapters, and a multifunction I/O
chip carrying the serial console, ethernet, a PS/2 controller, and the real-time clock. The fork is
a machine, seven device models, an R10000 processor model, and 149 register-level subtests, added to
upstream QEMU with no new file under the MIPS target at all.
The Installed Kernel, Naming Its Own Machine
Both the install and the boot are committed as tracked golden transcripts. The installed kernel, booted off the disk the installer wrote, identifies the machine itself and reaches a root shell:
OpenBSD 6.9 (GENERIC-IP27) #0: Thu Apr 22 03:53:59 UTC 2021
mainbus0 at root: Origin 200
cpu0 at mainbus0 nasid 0: MIPS R10000 CPU rev 0.0 180 MHz, R10000 FPU rev 0.0
xbridge0 at xbow0 widget 8: Bridge revision 3
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 1 lun 0: <QEMU, QEMU HARDDISK, 2.5+>
com0: console
root on sd0a swap on sd0b dump on sd0b
login: root
origami# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(wheel) groups=0(wheel), 2(kmem), 3(sys), 4(tty), 5(operator), ...
origami# halt -pThe emulator was started as -M origin200, and the kernel independently reads an Origin 200 out of
the boot flash. Root is a real filesystem on the installed disk, 41% used. id returns root’s
groups from the mounted filesystem, an authenticated session, not a login banner.
About This Project
Origami is a permanent fork of QEMU that emulates the SGI Origin 200. It exists because nothing else emulated the machine. It ships nothing and sells nothing, and 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.