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IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

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Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#21

Post by pjmlp »

inkyoto wrote: post #11
kristopolous wrote: post #4

AIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to touch, is it worth it?

It is hard to say about now, for most of the interesting AIX features are tightly coupled to the IBM hardware (e.g. dynamic CPU re-/allocation across LPAR's and a gazillion of other things), and the hardware is rare to come by nowadays. For its time, though, AIX was highly innovative and was perhaps the first UNIX that bundled a LVM and a journaling file system into the standard system distribution (and not as separa…

My last stint with Aix was in 2002, however I still have found memories of using a UNIX that in some corners felt a bit like Windows thanks XCOFF.

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#22

Post by qubex »

Back when I dealt with AIX (1997-2001) it was common to deride it on usenet as “UNIX by and for drunk aliens” but I myself enjoyed its very regular naming conventions and extremely low footprint whilst under intensive memory load, which was common back then when RAM was stratospherically expensive. Excellent NUMA support too.

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#23

Post by sys_64738 »

raverbashing wrote: post #20
sys_64738 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "developed".

They get the maintenance money of people still running apps on there while changing/fixing one thing or another a year.

So really it's a sustaining org than NPE.

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#24

Post by chasil »

Spooky23 wrote: post #17
kristopolous wrote: post #4

AIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to touch, is it worth it?

I really enjoyed it, although Solaris was easier as the user base was bigger. My usage was circa 2000-2005. I loved smit and smitty, and would start new interns and juniors on AIX because the command lines to perform tasks would be generated and allow them to become productive quickly.

An AIX admin told me in the late 90s that there were no kernel tunables (i.e. sysctl.conf). That would be very nice.

The jfs journaling filesystem was much better than ufs until sun got zfs into the formal distribution

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#25

Post by chasil »

Nursie wrote: post #14
kristopolous wrote: post #4

AIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to touch, is it worth it?

I mean ... I used to write software in C that targeted AIX as well as HPUX, Solaris etc back in the 00s. It was fine. Posix compliant, had a C compiler, debugging was OK with dbx (IIRC you could get ddd to use dbx as its subordinate debugger, which was helpful). The main selling point AFAICT was that it was on POWER, which has always been a pretty competitive set of processors, often faster than x86/64 in some (no do…

Zones all run under the same kernel.

I'm guessing these lpars all have separate kernels.

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#26

Post by jmclnx »

kristopolous wrote: post #4

AIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to touch, is it worth it?

Depends on what you mean by "worth it" :)

I develop applications (c) on AIX and it is a bit different, I find it rather close to the BSDs. There are minor oddities, but I think it is rather good, and I personally like it.

As time goes forward, I think RHEL is going to be the direction.

It is a bit sad to see these proprietary UNIXs fall by the wayside, but most of the reason is their fault for the restrictive licenses they have.

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#27

Post by hapless »

sys_64738 wrote: post #3

It's very interesting to think AIX was ported to such a foreign architecture as it was so deeply tied to the R/S 6000 hardware. IBM Austin is where AIX was developed in the 90s.

RS/6000 was the fourth AIX platform after x86 (AIX 1.x), IBM RT/ROMP (AIX 2.x), and the mainframe (AIX/370, AIX/390)

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#28

Post by tssva »

Nursie wrote: post #14
kristopolous wrote: post #4

AIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to touch, is it worth it?

I mean ... I used to write software in C that targeted AIX as well as HPUX, Solaris etc back in the 00s. It was fine. Posix compliant, had a C compiler, debugging was OK with dbx (IIRC you could get ddd to use dbx as its subordinate debugger, which was helpful). The main selling point AFAICT was that it was on POWER, which has always been a pretty competitive set of processors, often faster than x86/64 in some (no do…

LPARS would be more like Solaris dynamic domains not zones.

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#29

Post by hapless »

mrlonglong wrote: post #2

To bootstrap GCC all you need is Linux. Crosscompile GCC on Linux to generate a set of binaries and install on AIX. Job done.

Cross-compiling for AIX+IA64+COFF is going to be tricky.

I rather doubt binutils supports that particular combination of items

Re: IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again

#30

Post by dark-star »

I still wonder why neither qemu nor any other (open-source) emulator ever tackled Itanium emulation.

Is the CPU architecture so complicated? Is it so undocumented? I would think that projects like MAME have in the past reverse-engineered and emulated much more complicated and undocumented systems (some of which were even encrypted).

So why don't we have any Itanium emulators yet?

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