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PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

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Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#51

Post by Someone »

kev009 wrote: post #15
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 beauty of OpenFirmware is that it is extended with Forth, which is extremely compact (so could fit on small PROMs in the computer and fcode for addon cards). If you are designing a PCI card, you can write a bit of fcode that will run on SPARC and PowerPC for instance to expose opaque RAID volumes as bootable disks. Keep in mind the PC BIOS was and is a complete tire fire, and uses something like this https://en.w…

“you can write a bit of fcode that will run on SPARC and PowerPC”

and x86, and ARM, and CPUs not even invented yet. Performance wouldn’t be optimal compared to native drivers, but decent enough to boot a workable system.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#52

Post by NCommander »

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…

AIX at least has LLVM, and IBM had unofficial GCC ports for years.

If you want a dumpster fire for development work, I'd highly recommend HP-UX. HP-UX's stdio wasn't very std back in 1990s. What I remember is a bunch of syscalls seemingly existing but not actually working despite being OK with the same code on Solaris and Linux.

Somewhere around 2003-4, it appears all development basically consists of security patches and new Itanium hardware enablement, and aCC barely supported anything C++ related; its more like trying to use Borland C++, and GCC was really iffy, although it had the advantage that post PA-RISC, HP did adopt ELF.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#53

Post by unixhero »

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…

Thanks for the interesting comment here. A friend of mines' favorite OS is AIX, as he operated such machines at a university he did systems administration. It sounds like a great system. However;

As a retro computing and alternative architectures enthusiast I am visciously annoyed by how IBM treats enthusiasts. How in the world am I supposed test out, learn and be inspired towards such a closed ecosystem. I even owned an IBM RS/6000, but IBM wouldn't sell me the screen. Anyhow, even with financial means I cannot enter the world of IBM, as they hold OS closely guarded. Can I try AIX on emulator? No. Can I try it on hardware I own, yes/no. Can I learn Mainframe stuff? No. sigh Have I let my disdain for IBM's behavior frame my buying in various mega corps I advise? Yes.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#54

Post by rwmj »

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…

On most current Linux systems you can get an OpenFirmware shell (or SLOF, a free reimplementation) by doing:

  $ qemu-system-ppc64 -m 1024 -serial stdio
  [.. lots of boot messages ..]
  E3407: Load failed

  Type 'boot' and press return to continue booting the system.
  Type 'reset-all' and press return to reboot the system.

  Ready! 
  0 >

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#55

Post by jerzyt »

In the late 90's, I had Solaris running on my Toshiba laptop. I loved it. It was a great OS and development platform. At some point it became too difficult to keep up with software upgrades, otherwise, I'd still be using it.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#56

Post by easytiger »

bcantrill wrote: post #24

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 ha…

I worked at Sun for a while and one thing I recall was how we could grab any abandoned hardware laying around and take it for whatever you wanted.

I recall wheeling an archaic 4ft tall tower format disk enclosure I found in a server room corner to my desk and connecting it to either the x86 dual CPU desktop I used (which had since lost all its side panels before I inherited it) or an ultra 30 I had there, I forget which.

I then set up the internal s10 build with ZFS and playing around with it. That's when I first become confident in the benefits of Solaris over anything else out there at the time. Used Solaris 10 as my main desktop for nearly 4 years

We even had intel itanium desktops for testing. Always referred to as the "itanics".

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#57

Post by calvin_ »

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…

As someone with lots of experience porting stuff to AIX, this is fairly accurate. AIX takes a malicious compliance stance to POSIX.

The worst part is that the AIX compatibility layer IBM created for i is closer to Unix normalcy than AIX itself.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#58

Post by icedchai »

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 did some development on AIX machines in the early 2000's... AIX 4.3, I think. Our customer was an all IBM shop and they felt Linux was too immature, so all their critical apps ran on AIX, with full high availability (HACMP, anyone?) and a shared storage array. Coming from mainly a Solaris and Linux background, "smit" actually made the machines a joy to administer.

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#59

Post by kjs3 »

linksnapzz wrote: post #28
kjs3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah...one of the IBM folks pointed me at the my first AIX box and just said "smit is your friend...don't fight smit". He were right.

AIX is Unix that a bunch of really smart folks with a mainframe mentality said "we can improve this...".

Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000

#60

Post by apaprocki »

NCommander wrote: post #52
apaprocki wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AIX at least has LLVM, and IBM had unofficial GCC ports for years. If you want a dumpster fire for development work, I'd highly recommend HP-UX. HP-UX's stdio wasn't very std back in 1990s. What I remember is a bunch of syscalls seemingly existing but not actually working despite being OK with the same code on Solaris and Linux. Somewhere around 2003-4, it appears all development basically consists of security patche…

Yeah, I've used HP-UX as well. All the fun of an OS and compiler no one uses, with the added bonus of all the quirks of a CPU that really no one uses. I wonder if the soldiers 1000s of libraries deep in the Oracle link line read HN and have some fun IA-64 porting tales.
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