11–20 of 28 posts
> AIX Running [ inside Qemu ] on Apple's M1 FTFY; It is still interesting , but leaving that little detail out in the HN submission is IMO a bit clickbaity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, not news but definitely interesting. Some of these old unixes were only available for multi-thousand dollar machines. Current computers are powerful enough to run these systems somewhat comfortably inside emulators or using JIT or dynamic binary translation... If 30 years ago you dreamed on using any of those systems, now you can do it.
On the other hand, the only real reason you’d want to run AIX is because you had to, because you had the hardware and there was no other option.
Note, that for that era, AIX was a very solid choice. Only other real option was Sun/Solaris, which was dying after the dot-com implosion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, not news but definitely interesting. Some of these old unixes were only available for multi-thousand dollar machines. Current computers are powerful enough to run these systems somewhat comfortably inside emulators or using JIT or dynamic binary translation... If 30 years ago you dreamed on using any of those systems, now you can do it.
On the other hand, the only real reason you’d want to run AIX is because you had to, because you had the hardware and there was no other option.
It all worked exactly as advertised. I was on a small team that did performance monitoring, optimizations, and capacity planning and we watched the metrics very closely for production workloads (running DB2). It was seriously impressive.
I miss SMITty!
We seem to be having a lot of "emulators for old Unix boxes exist" posts recently? It's sort of neat, but kinda not news really. Now, I'm off to port Hercules to QNX to make my car an IBM mainframe.
Yeah agreed. There was the adafruit one too. Though I'd love to see a PA-RISC emulator for the old HP-UX with VUE. But that's not around unfortunately.
https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Running_HP-UX_9.0_o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, not news but definitely interesting. Some of these old unixes were only available for multi-thousand dollar machines. Current computers are powerful enough to run these systems somewhat comfortably inside emulators or using JIT or dynamic binary translation... If 30 years ago you dreamed on using any of those systems, now you can do it.
On the other hand, the only real reason you’d want to run AIX is because you had to, because you had the hardware and there was no other option.
I miss SMITty!
Yes and was chatting with an IBM rep in the 90's about SMIT or smitty for the tty terminal flavour and was told the hardest part was the running man icon at the top right. Getting that to run at the same speed upon all hardware took some effort from all accounts. But darn - smit just made anybody who could type it and some basic understandings an AIX admin and what I really really loved about smit was you could press…
I miss SMITty!
SMIT and smitty made AIX system administration somewhat tolerable as it could insulate you from having to figure out the incredibly arcane commands and arguments for that environment. SMIT and smitty worked exceptionally well.
> AIX Running [ inside Qemu ] on Apple's M1 FTFY; It is still interesting , but leaving that little detail out in the HN submission is IMO a bit clickbaity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, the only real reason you’d want to run AIX is because you had to, because you had the hardware and there was no other option.
I worked with AIX on Power5/5+ (mid 2000s) and their hypervisor for LPARs and what they called micro-LPARs at the time was astonishingly good. It provided very nice granularity and control for running multiple LPARs. An LPAR is like a VM, but is closer to bare-metal than what you find in an Intel environment. You had to allocate at least 1/10th of a virtual processor per LPAR. They had something called 'entitled capa…