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PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

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Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#41

Post by skissane »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #8
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…

The most desirable feature would have been the possibility to have one very compact and flexible firmware for any expansion card for any host system on any bus system. As it were, the market decided to have it the other way around. I.e. an absolutely common graphics card with an ATI chip for some workstation, or Power Macintosh was a 'speciality'. IIRC Acer or some other vendor beginning with A produced ONE VGA-card…

> Now we have EFI/UEFI/SSBA with all the PC-inspired crap

I know what EFI and UEFI are, but I've never heard of SSBA before, and I can't find anything about it on Google. What is SSBA?

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#42

Post by JdeBP »

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…

AIX was one of the earliest Unices to include a proper service manager, the SRC back in 1990. AT&T Unix System 5 had the too-often-forgotten SAF in 1989 with a lot of things that look familiar to a modern eye. But it did not extend beyond the "port" model of ttymon and listen. The SRC did.

AIX was also, hand in hand with the SRC, one of the earliest Unices to do away with run levels. With the SRC present, there was only the one run level. Everything else became reserved.

Some people erroneously think things to be novelties that AIX was doing 30 years ago.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/unix-service-access-facility.html

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/run-levels-are-history.html

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/inittab-is-history.html

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#43

Post by pjmlp »

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 used to also target Aix back in the .com days.

One thing that surprised me, but also made me feel quite at home, was that originally Aix adopted the same model for shared libraries as Windows, including import files.

As far as I can tell, this has been superseded by the traditional UNIX ELF model, although they are still supported.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#44

Post by saagarjha »

apaprocki wrote: post #33
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…

SAs have their own likes/dislikes. From an end-user dev point of view AIX is pretty harsh. XCOFF binaries mean almost no tooling works with them. It’s 2020 and IBM finally came around to adopting LLVM/Clang to the platform. There’s lots of strange deployment warts like no $ORIGIN support, everything is shared/PIC but you have none of the ELF naming support, shared libraries stay in a system-wide library cache even af…

Sounds a lot like macOS.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#45

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

skissane wrote: post #41
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most desirable feature would have been the possibility to have one very compact and flexible firmware for any expansion card for any host system on any bus system. As it were, the market decided to have it the other way around. I.e. an absolutely common graphics card with an ATI chip for some workstation, or Power Macintosh was a 'speciality'. IIRC Acer or some other vendor beginning with A produced ONE VGA-card…

> Now we have EFI/UEFI/SSBA with all the PC-inspired crap I know what EFI and UEFI are, but I've never heard of SSBA before, and I can't find anything about it on Google. What is SSBA?

Sorry, typo. SBSA

It's basically UEFI for 64bit ARM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#46

Post by Y_Y »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #34
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…

Yet I managed to trash ODM on our RS/6000 cluster in 1992 or so, so that the metadata AIX had was inconsistent with the quorum of binary metadata stored on special partition tables on disks. Had to low-level format the disks and start over (the 857MB SCSI disks about as expensive as a compact car). What's perhaps unknown to many is that the Linux volume manager was/is a straight clone of AIX's, with IBM terminology l…

Does FreeBSD still not include support for ablatives of second-declension neuter nouns? You surely want "vīnō" there.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#47

Post by hlandau »

aryonoco wrote: post #40
tal8d wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ppc is still a thing, my project computer is a power9. The only reason it isn't my daily driver is because I can't help but tinker with it. Being able to rewrite the supervisor chip code in order to get that fan curve just so, and having the support of unabridged and NDA free documentation - instead of grinding through reverse engineering... feels good. I highly recommend it, just stick to known working GPUs, the mmu…

PPC is/was different from POWER. Technically related but they diverged enough that it was a different ISA for all intents and purposes

To be clear, you're talking about the original POWER ISA. The PowerPC ISA has subsequently been renamed the Power ISA (not to be confused with the POWER ISA). Confusingly, IBM's POWER CPUs (POWER3, POWER4, POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, POWER8, POWER9) since POWER3 implement the Power ISA (then known as the PowerPC ISA), not the POWER ISA. POWER2 was the last CPU to implement the POWER ISA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER_instruction_set_arch...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#48

Post by scruffyherder »

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…

I wish it were my hammering of GCC/GNU stuff in this post, all the credit is to 'PA-RISC' (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYyCai0PQQ0O6yA_yQzBY-g). I'd just started one of those discord things, and suddenly I'm being hit up with guest submissions, and pretty freaking AWESOME ones at that.

It makes my current GCC thing look laughable at best, but yeah the future is awesome!

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#49

Post by tannhaeuser »

Y_Y wrote: post #46
tannhaeuser wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet I managed to trash ODM on our RS/6000 cluster in 1992 or so, so that the metadata AIX had was inconsistent with the quorum of binary metadata stored on special partition tables on disks. Had to low-level format the disks and start over (the 857MB SCSI disks about as expensive as a compact car). What's perhaps unknown to many is that the Linux volume manager was/is a straight clone of AIX's, with IBM terminology l…

Does FreeBSD still not include support for ablatives of second-declension neuter nouns? You surely want "vīnō" there.

:) ah, spotted the Latin teacher! yeah no it was entirely my fault to mis-/non-decline vinum; though "in vinum" (in + accusative) actually has a valid use as well and not just in medieval Latin, like in "put the truth into the wine" which actually is as good a word-play for vinum the volume manager as "in vino veritas"

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#50

Post by rbanffy »

hlandau wrote: post #47
aryonoco wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PPC is/was different from POWER. Technically related but they diverged enough that it was a different ISA for all intents and purposes

To be clear, you're talking about the original POWER ISA. The PowerPC ISA has subsequently been renamed the Power ISA (not to be confused with the POWER ISA). Confusingly, IBM's POWER CPUs (POWER3, POWER4, POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, POWER8, POWER9) since POWER3 implement the Power ISA (then known as the PowerPC ISA), not the POWER ISA. POWER2 was the last CPU to implement the POWER ISA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM…

And now the ISA has been updated for the POWER10 CPUs that'll be announced shortly.
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