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IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) aka Project Monterey runs again!

Posted on September 24, 2022 by tenox

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

[monterey_logo]

Project Monterey was an attempt to unify the fragmented Unix market
in to a single cross vendor Unix that would run on Intel Itanium. The
main collaborators were: IBM who brought it's AIX, HP was supposed to
bring some bits from HP-UX, Sequent from DYNIX/ptx and SCO from
UnixWare. It appears that the project shared the fate of Itanium - it
totally failed and in the end Linux took it's spot as a single Unix.
The main legacy of Project Monterey was the famous SCO vs IBM
lawsuit.

IBM did however produce AIX version for IA64 architecture. According
to Wikipedia, 32 copies were sold in 2001. Except of course no one
has kept a copy and the famous OS was lost forever.

Some 21 years later friends of NCommander checked in with a set of
AIX 5L IA64 CDROMS! The CDs have been imaged and dumped. You can
download them here. However downloading will not help much as there
is no virtualization or emulation platform that can run these. Yes we
did try Simics and everything else you can think of. In fact the OS
will not even run on more modern Itanium 2 CPUs. The only supported
architecture is the "pre-release" Itanium 1 aka Merced. And it's very
picky! The OS won't even boot with wrong type keyboard.

It's speculated that the AIX IA64 will work only on "Intel
Engineering Sample" Itanium Workstation that was later sold in
several OEM branded clones: IBM IntelliStation Z Pro 6894, HP i2000
Workstation, SGI 750, Dell Precision Workstation 730 and
Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius 880. Yes they all look alike because these
were all made by Intel with custom colors and badges.

[ItaniumWorkstations-1]Intel Itanium Workstation Lineup

I was able to score a working HP i2000 Workstation, install AIX and
boot it up!

[IMG_8331-1024x768]AIX 5L IA64 on HP i2000 Workstation - boot loader
[IMG_8334-1024x768]AIX 5L IA64 on HP i2000 Workstation - logged in

Unfortunately the system is not really functioning very well. It
doesn't support the onboard NIC and no graphics mode for X11. I'm
digging in for supported NICs and GPUs. The graphic cards seem more
abundant. There is a long list of supported RS/6000 GTXxxx cards.
However the OS seem to only support these two NICs:

devices.pci.23100020.rte - IBM PCI 10/100 Ethernet Adapter Software
devices.pci.ae120100.rte - Gigabit Ethernet PCI Adapter Software

If you happen to know part numbers for these, or where to get them
please do let me know.

You can find an interesting collection of documents and some tools on
ibmfiles. There also is a DDK available here.

The next step is to get GCC going as the system comes without C
compiler which was a separate download. This post suggests that GCC
and binutils did support ia64-ibm-aix at some point in 2001. If you
are an expert in cross compiling gcc to oddball platform please let
me know!

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged aix, itanium,
project monerey, unix by tenox. Bookmark the permalink.

0 thoughts on "IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) aka Project Monterey runs
again!"

 1. [0594c6c2]bhtooefr on September 24, 2022 at 7:29 pm said:

    Looks like 23100020 is feature code 2968 per this Usenet posting.

    This listing claims that the following part numbers are valid for
    that feature code: 21H5384, 23L4173, 23L4294, 91H0397, 94H0390,
    94H0823 (note that IBM likes to have two different part numbers
    for the same part based on what channel it was distributed
    through, so those part numbers likely refer to three different
    revisions)

    The other adapter is a Googlewhack that directs to this blog
    post, though, which makes me wonder if it's actually for the
    on-board adapter and it's just not working.

    Reply |

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