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PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

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Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#21

Post by kev009 »

drewg123 wrote: post #16
kev009 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS…

I had the distinct misfortune to port an HPC & ethernet driver stack to AIX in the early 2000s. It was kinda BSD (mbufs), and kinda not (everything else), and just generally weird. Having a test machine that took ~20 minutest to panic and reboot made the process extra fun. It was one of the more annoying systems to develop drivers for that I've ever used. And I've done drivers for various BSDs, Linux, MacOS, ESX, Sol…

I would have used VIOS for that situation and passed the PCI device through to the LPAR for most the work. It would be about 5 minutes if you had reasonable disks and you could just barrel fish several cards and LPARs for intense debugging sessions.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#22

Post by kev009 »

neilv wrote: post #18
kev009 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS…

Crazy; I didn't know the AIX kernel could be paged. I'm wondering what kind of diskless workstations or thin clients IBM might've had in mind. Bottom-end engineering workstations would have at least a 100MB drive by the time the first RS/6000 models came out. But there were X terminals (usually diskless, sometimes with only 4MB RAM), and what I'll call "sub-workstations" that were compatible miniature engineering wor…

I know at least HP, IBM, and Sun had comprehensive X terminal strategies. I think this predated that with for instance cut down 7012s or the 7011-220 RSC (single chip POWER1) pizzabox.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#23

Post by throw0101a »

azalemeth wrote: post #2

Posts like this, projects like these, and people like Neozeed are part of why I think the GNU project fundamentally is brilliant. Getting GCC running on barely-produced prototype hardware system, on an ancient version of Solaris which itself was a particular pain to install, whilst entertaining and informing the reader about the history of the PowerPC migration circa 1994, is no mean feat. What were the desirable/sex…

> What were the desirable/sexy features of OpenFirmware anyway?

When I was admining Solaris boxes, it had useful boot-from-net options, both RARP and later DHCP-based JumpStart: this was many years before PXE. When I started using Mac OS X, during the pre-Intel days, all the various Mac hardware used OpenFirmware as well so that knowledge transferred over. OF was also used on IBM's POWER systems, and the OLPC "XO" computer used it with x86 chips.

If ARM ever wanted a common 'BIOS' system for their ecosystem, the OF could be a good choice (there are BSD-licensed options):

* https://www.openfirmware.info/Open_Firmware

UEFI is the other main pre-OS system out there.

More generally OpenFirmware allowed for platform-independent device drivers:

* https://www.netbsd.org/support/hardware/ofw.html

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#24

Post by bcantrill »

So, this post (which I loved) brings back a lot of memories for me (having joined Solaris Kernel Development in 1996, when ppc was still a thing -- if barely).

If I may, a quick anecdote: back in MPK17 (now Facebook!) my office was next to that of Mike Sullivan, who was one of the lead engineers on on297, our internal name for Solaris 2.6. As part of his nature of running latest bits on everything around him, Mike had in his office (among many other things) a laptop. Over my years of working in Menlo Park, I can remember exactly one theft: one night, that laptop of Mike's -- and the laptop alone -- was stolen. The funny thing (and the reason this story made me think of it): it was a ThinkPad 850, an IBM PReP laptop running an internal build of on297 (to my knowledge the only one that ever existed) -- and I have often wished I could be there when the thief tried to unload what was surely the world's most arcane laptop, if not its most useless...

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#25

Post by kjs3 »

kev009 wrote: post #21
drewg123 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the distinct misfortune to port an HPC & ethernet driver stack to AIX in the early 2000s. It was kinda BSD (mbufs), and kinda not (everything else), and just generally weird. Having a test machine that took ~20 minutest to panic and reboot made the process extra fun. It was one of the more annoying systems to develop drivers for that I've ever used. And I've done drivers for various BSDs, Linux, MacOS, ESX, Sol…

I would have used VIOS for that situation and passed the PCI device through to the LPAR for most the work. It would be about 5 minutes if you had reasonable disks and you could just barrel fish several cards and LPARs for intense debugging sessions.

Yeah...the first rule of AIX Club is AIX isn't (wasn't) old-school Unix. You actually had to learn AIX.

Back when I was in that game, we had an AIX guru spend a week or two teaching our kernel devs how things actually worked and at the end everyone was "even if I don't agree with how you did things, I understand how to make things work". We saw lot of folks try and shoehorn their view of Unix into AIX and it never ended well.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#26

Post by skissane »

kev009 wrote: post #12
neilv wrote: post #7

If you get access to an IBM RS/6000, another thing to play around with on it is the original AIX operating system. Imagine a Unix that got an IBM working-over. When the RS/6000 workstations first came out, AIX was a big contrast to the more seat-of-pants workstation Unix of SunOS 4 (this was before Solaris 2). Some of the AIX changes weren't only enterprise-y server management OS abstractions, but fun: AIX included a…

I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS…

> I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users

I've never been particularly negative about AIX at all, but I've been burned before by some of its ugly warts [1]. In particular, the fact that (unlike other platforms) errno isn't thread-local by default, and you have to -D_THREAD_SAFE_ERRNO to get a thread-safe errno.

[1] https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/issues/237

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#27

Post by skissane »

zyztem wrote: post #5

Years later there was another port of OpenSolaris to IBM Power computers called "Polaris": https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/10/solaris_on_power/ And even port to IBM z/VM ("Sirius"): https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/solaris_on_mainfram...

> And even port to IBM z/VM ("Sirius"):

Unfortunately that died, because Oracle stopped being willing to cooperate with the port [1]. Of course, I understand why they might not see it as being in their commercial interests to support porting their OS to a competitor's hardware; but, I think their turn away from openness with Solaris accelerated its decline rather than delaying it.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/29/oracle_solaris_z_ib...

(Disclaimer: ex-Oracle employee, but I was never working on Solaris directly, just on higher-level middleware stuff which sometimes ran on Solaris, and I really don't know anything about this topic beyond what has been reported in the media.)

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#28

Post by linksnapzz »

kjs3 wrote: post #25
kev009 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have used VIOS for that situation and passed the PCI device through to the LPAR for most the work. It would be about 5 minutes if you had reasonable disks and you could just barrel fish several cards and LPARs for intense debugging sessions.

Yeah...the first rule of AIX Club is AIX isn't (wasn't) old-school Unix. You actually had to learn AIX. Back when I was in that game, we had an AIX guru spend a week or two teaching our kernel devs how things actually worked and at the end everyone was "even if I don't agree with how you did things, I understand how to make things work". We saw lot of folks try and shoehorn their view of Unix into AIX and it never en…

My first five minutes on an AIX machine involved trying to find a logfile to read...this is how I discovered 'errpt'; and the (new to me) IBM habit of giving certain cli output in all-caps. "Why is this machine shouting at me?"

I did end up liking it a lot, and I wish I had more of them. Once you set aside your expectations about what a unix should act like, it was kinda fun.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#29

Post by korethr »

And here I was, thinking I was a damned fool for wanting to port Illumos to run on Power 9. Well, okay, I probably am still a damned fool for wanting such, but knowing that the Solaris codebase has run on Power before gives me hope that it might actually be possible.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#30

Post by bigger_cheese »

hestefisk wrote: post #11

I would love love love one of these machines to run Windows NT and some flavour or ancient Unix. I’m in Australia and desperately looking for an old PowerPC. Does anyone know where to dig these machines up? Yes I tried eBay but it is prohibitively expensive to post from overseas to Sydney.

Ex-government auctions have stuff occasionally. When I used to live in Canberra every two month or so one would be advertised could get lots of old hardware for dirt cheap. Mostly old Sun Sparc stuff but sometimes HP or IBM power based hardware too. I imagine Sydney would have similar auctions.
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