It means they managed to get irix running in qemu. Presumably on an x86 cpu.
Notable because the sgi indigo had a MIPS R3000A CPU.
Notable because the sgi indigo had a MIPS R3000A CPU.
Not quite. It means that they got qemu to emulate IRIX's syscall layer on linux. So you can run, lets say, a MIPS IRIX binary on x86 linux without having to emulate the entire machine.
Wine impersonates OS calls, (including syscalls) but does not perform emulation on the binary itself. Wine can only run windows applications written for x86, but not windows applications written for itanium.
This appears to be running both hardware emulation on the supplied binary, (which is what VMware/KVM/virtualbox etc do) as well as wine-like OS impersonation.
I made up the word "impersonates" for what wine does just to avoid confusion. It's not a word that's used in the literature afaik, although perhaps it (or a word like it) should be.