[HN Gopher] IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey R...
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IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again
Author : merlinscholz
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-09-24 10:15 UTC (12 hours ago)
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| bitcharmer wrote:
| I didn't have much exposure to AIX as opposed to Linux and BSD
| but I did not enjoy working with it at all. There are many others
| like me and I always attributed this to GNU's popularity. Every
| task that was simple on Linux involved reading manuals and
| looking up informational on AIX.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 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.
| Maursault wrote:
| AIX is still developed in Austin.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Define "developed".
| raverbashing wrote:
| They get the maintenance money of people still running apps
| on there while changing/fixing one thing or another a year.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| So really it's a sustaining org than NPE.
| WireWater wrote:
| Fixes are keeping up with CVEs fairly quickly. The
| process is actually pretty good.
| hapless wrote:
| 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)
| trasz wrote:
| How related to one another were those though? I remember AIX
| being expanded to "Any IBM UNIX".
| classichasclass wrote:
| Not particularly. Any influence or overlap between them was
| in a strictly general sense. There are front end
| similarities but the internals are rather different, as
| would be expected for a rapidly evolving OS with lots of
| different authors. AIX didn't start to gel until around the
| 3.x or 4.x days.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| To bootstrap GCC all you need is Linux. Crosscompile GCC on Linux
| to generate a set of binaries and install on AIX. Job done.
| hapless wrote:
| Cross-compiling for AIX+IA64+COFF is going to be tricky.
|
| I rather doubt binutils supports that particular combination of
| items
| klodolph wrote:
| *** Configuration ia64-ibm-aix is obsolete. *** Specify
| --enable-obsolete to build it anyway. *** Support will
| be REMOVED in the next major release of BINUTILS, ***
| unless a maintainer comes forward.
| qubex wrote:
| 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.
| a-dub wrote:
| i remember every error message from every unix tool spitting
| out some unique identifier code... i presume some ibm
| documentation standard.
|
| i also remember a weird gui for administering everything. i
| assume that was the result of ibm's big investments.
| pram wrote:
| IBM sells (sold?) a thing called the HMC that manages
| multiple AIX machines, and their LPAR/WPARs. It was a web
| interface, maybe that is what you remember?
|
| It had a dedicated 1U server you had to buy too lol, what a
| grift
| classichasclass wrote:
| Yeah, that's what started turning me off modern systems.
| None of my earlier hardware required it, but my POWER6 did.
| You can do some things in ASMI but if you want to
| reconfigure an LPAR or (horrors) add one, then you're
| digging out the HMC. It was just an off the shelf IBM x86
| system running Linux, so I should image it and see if I can
| make a VM out of it instead of lugging it out of storage
| now and then.
|
| The real grift was Capacity on Demand, which requires
| access keys to unlock hardware only IBM provides. That was
| a lot of "fun" when the system planar died and the new one
| didn't give me all my processors back. It took nearly a
| week to iron it out with IBM directly; even the VAR
| couldn't fix it.
| thequux wrote:
| I run my HMC in a VM running in libvirtd. IIRC, IBM
| provided the image as a VMware appliance, but it was
| quite simple to convert to something open source (at the
| cost of being an unsupported configuration, but it's not
| as if I could afford an IBM sorry contact to start with),
| and the result works great with my single POWER7 machine
| (8233-E8B)
| devstar wrote:
| Perhaps you are remembering the System Management Interface
| Tool (SMIT) GUI? https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/txseries/8.2?top
| ic=SSAL2T_8.2.0/...
| a-dub wrote:
| yeah it was actually a TUI. the screenshot looks right but
| the name "smit" doesn't sound familiar. i want to say it
| had a three letter name (this was circa 1996).
|
| motif... lol
| mech422 wrote:
| I used to get a kick out of how the lil 'running man' in
| SMIT would fall over if a command failed :-P More sense of
| humour then I gave IBM credit for :-D
| pram wrote:
| IBM GUIs were always pretty interesting. The cursor in
| early ThinkPad BIOS was a bird that flapped its wings.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > the lil 'running man' in SMIT would fall over if a
| command failed
|
| To anyone wondering: https://youtu.be/YMWSD69BWqI?t=114
| classichasclass wrote:
| Smit happens(tm)
|
| Though I always preferred it from the command line
| (appropriately, the binary is named smitty: see, IBM _does_
| have a sense of humour).
| guenthert wrote:
| I think binary configuration files requiring specialized
| editors weren't all that popular. We had a RS6000 box in the
| lab, originally acquired to assure compatibility of our
| enterprise NAS appliance with AIX. Nobody liked that box and as
| Linux won the Unix wars, we were relieved that we didn't have
| to deal with it.
|
| (and yes, while Linux was then the (much) preferred choice, we
| had prior experience with other *nixes)
| kristopolous wrote:
| AIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to
| touch, is it worth it?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| chasil wrote:
| 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
| classichasclass wrote:
| There's no sysctl, but there are definitely tunables and
| there's a whole subculture of jackbooted thug AIX admins
| who spend all day messing with them for peak performance.
| I'm not one of them, but I remember tweaking the network
| stack a bit on my 4.1 system back in the day.
| inkyoto wrote:
| 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 separately
| purchased commercial products). It also has a single set of .a
| libraries which are both used as dynamic AND static libraries
| (courtesy of the XCOFF object file format). It also has uniform
| and very tidy naming conventions for command line utilities,
| e.g. anything that can create something (e.g. a user account, a
| user group, a logical volume etc) is prefixed with mk-,
| mutating commands are prefixed with ch-, destructive operations
| have the rm- prefix.
|
| Pervasive performance metrics and counters across the entire
| system are also cool.
|
| Lots of other small niceties I have forgotten about.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| inkyoto wrote:
| Oh, yeah, AIX is perhaps the only UNIX kernel out there that
| can preempt itself out of RAM into a swap space in nearly its
| entirety under a heavy memory shortage pressure, with the
| exception of the disk interrupt handler - to swap itself back
| in later, thanks to its peculiar VM subsystem design. It is
| no longer a material feature to have but is cool
| nevertheless.
| random314 wrote:
| JFS! You had the option to upgrade to Veritas' VxFS and VxVM.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| If you have a pressing business need for near-mainframe
| security and/or resilience for monoserver applications, and are
| willing to spend the money for it, its hardware, staffing, and
| the platinum IBM Support and training, in some cases it is
| still cheaper than rolling your own under Linux. IBM packages a
| one-stop shop for a RAS experience [1] that would need a deep
| bench of engineering talent to reproduce were you to roll your
| own equivalent in Linux. So some customers would rather pay IBM
| than try to build such an organization and for them, AIX is
| worth it.
|
| Generally however with IBM's rampant offshoring of support
| leading to a tremendous loss of institutional knowledge and
| rapid turnover of the offshore support teams, I've found unless
| you're signing 7-9 figure renewal checks and paying for
| enhanced support, the support experience is way worse than it
| was around the 1990's but still marginally better than other
| vendors.
|
| [1] https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/2RJYYJML
| sillystuff wrote:
| I'm surprised at all the positive things being said about AIX
| in this thread. I thought it was pretty terrible (my priors
| were SunOS, Solaris, HP/UX, IRIX, Linux, BSD). Personally, I
| preferred any of the above over AIX.
|
| AIX configuration was opaque with a windows registry style
| setup.
|
| All the standard utilities like sed, awk, etc., were versions
| from 1970. It was incredibly frustrating to use. They did
| supply some gnu software (IBM called it "linux" software), but
| it was managed through a second, separate, package manager,
| bare rpm.
|
| Decade(s) after every other nix had snapshots, the way to get a
| consistent backup on AIX was to _break_ your boot disk mirror
| and backup the orphaned disk (while praying you didn 't have a
| disk failure).
|
| Everything was spawned directly out of inittab. No
| sys-v/rc/etc. scripts.
|
| A hard down could break the journal on their filesystem rather
| than having the filesystem journal save your data. An fsck
| would not fix the journal.
|
| Most free software did not "just build and run" on AIX. Just
| about anything using autoconf required a custom wrapper around
| AIX's malloc to prevent it from segfaulting when being run, or
| fixing autoconf scripts to not mis-detect missing capabilities
| in AIX.
|
| AIX was not a first tier system for many vendors. I had to
| spend time in a debugger providing info to our SAN vendor on
| issues with their agent for AIX (we never had issues with their
| software for Solaris, Linux, or Windows).
|
| The hardware was funky. They did "neat" things like sharing a
| single CDROM drive between an entire rack of servers. But, to
| re-assign the CD drive, the IDE bus had to be re-assigned, as
| well as the PCI bus. And, invariably something would be
| blocking this, so "neat" in practice became a PITA.
|
| On the positives, AIX was stable once everything was dialed in,
| just like any other NIX. It was also trivial to create a
| bootable DR restore ISO for a system. And, their debugger was
| pleasant to use when diagnosing core dumps.
|
| "It used to be said that AIX looks like one space alien
| discovered Unix, and described it to another different space
| alien who then implemented AIX. But their universal translators
| were broken and they'd had to gesture a lot." -- Paul Tomblin
| dosman33 wrote:
| Sounds like perhaps like most of your experiences were with
| pre-AIX version 4? No system is perfect for sure. By the time
| I started using AIX it was with version 4 and was moving to 5
| and I can't say any of the problems you've described were
| things I had encountered with it. Certainly I had lots of
| problems though.
|
| Not suggesting you didn't experience these things though of
| course.
| sillystuff wrote:
| I don't recall versions, but the broken journal was
| whatever version was current in the early mid '00s. The
| symptom was as if a hard shutdown (on an fs without a
| journal) even after a clean OS shutdown-- i.e., have to run
| fsck on every startup (deleting/creating new journal fixed
| issues; just notable to me since I've never observed
| similar fs corruption on any other platform).
|
| Early '00s for the malloc issue with things that used
| autoconf. I first ran into this when attempting to build
| AIDE + deps on AIX. Creating a wrapper around AIX malloc
| and linking it in was easier than re-working a bunch of
| autoconf scripts.
|
| I haven't touched AIX since the late mid-00s. My
| comparisons were to the state of its contemporaries, at the
| time.
|
| Yes, nothing is perfect, but AIX was the wartiest, and
| experience from other NIX transferred the least, of the
| commercial NIXs that I've used (IMO, Solaris was the nicest
| of the commercial offerings [pre-Oracle]). But, it looks
| like AIX was liked/loved by quite a few folks per this
| comment section-- I wish we'd had some of these folks on
| staff at the job with AIX boxes, so those of us less
| enthusiastic about the platform wouldn't have had to deal
| with it.
| neilv wrote:
| When the RS/6000 launched, AIX had some neat system management
| OS features and hypertext documentation that was better than
| any of the other workstation vendors at the time.
|
| Also, the RS/6000 and/or AIX was noticeably fast at some
| things. I remember a Systems Engineer being amazed that you
| could invoke a shell window (aixterm, IIRC), and it snapped
| instantly onto the screen, no lag.) The workstation vendors
| were often leapfrogging each other, but on that one metric, 0
| perceptible time was new. I don't remember how compiles
| compared.
|
| If you can pick up an RS/6000 on eBay, with licenses and
| install media, it might be a little fun to play with. And maybe
| either check that GCC will work, or that you're getting license
| and media for the compiler.
|
| Today, though, there's so much neat stuff to play with atop
| Linux alone, that you could never get through it all. And, if
| you haven't already made your fortune and retired from paid
| work, things atop Linux are also more likely to be more
| directly relevant to paid jobs for current production
| environments, or at least to be better for resume keyword-
| matching.
| Nursie wrote:
| 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 doubt carefully massaged)
| metrics.
|
| I think, like a lot of IBM systems and a lot of commercial
| unix, at that point it was ahead of the game in its system-
| paritioning capabilities, having LPARs much like z/OS (and
| Solaris Zones I guess).
|
| I don't know if it has any other major unique selling points,
| as a C programmer I tended to focus on commonalities rather
| than differences!
| tssva wrote:
| LPARS would be more like Solaris dynamic domains not zones.
| chasil wrote:
| Zones all run under the same kernel.
|
| I'm guessing these lpars all have separate kernels.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| My understanding is
|
| lpar - VM or domU or such
|
| wpar - zone or jail or container or such
| classichasclass wrote:
| Correct, LPARs are akin to hardware partitions. Even my
| single-instance personal box has an LPAR and doesn't run on
| the metal (it just gets everything that's installed).
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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.
| ourmandave wrote:
| No. AIX is the "you can't have nice things" version of linux.
|
| Command options you take for granted aren't there in AIX.
|
| Search on Unix stack exchange and there's always a more
| complicated "here's how you do it in AIX."
| icedchai wrote:
| AIX pioneered technologies, like logical volume management,
| journaled file systems, etc. way before they were available
| in other Unixes. LVM existed for Solaris, but was an
| expensive third party add-on (Veritas Volume Manager, etc.)
|
| It definitely had a weird feel to it though!
| SpaceInvader wrote:
| I disagree. I used to be an AIX administrator for well over a
| decade, got certified in basically everything related to AIX
| being on the side hard core FreeBSD user (still have some
| servers). In my opinion AIX is indeed different, but rock
| solid and fun to work with.
| ourmandave wrote:
| I've been since AIX v3. Moving to linux 10 years ago was
| like coming out of the stone ages.
|
| But it's the same for every language. Something that's a
| stupid hard problem that takes a huge effort to solve is
| suddenly a one-liner in the next release.
| Nursie wrote:
| Does the unix rosetta stone page still exist?
|
| That was a godsend when trying to move between half a dozen
| commercial unix systems 15 years ago.
| Maursault wrote:
| >IBM who brought it's _[ sic ]_ AIX
|
| This is misleading at best.
|
| AIX didn't exist for IBM to purchase. IBM collaborated with
| Interactive Systems Corporation under contract to develop AIX in
| 1985 and released AIX Version 1 in 1986. IBM collaborated with
| Locus Computing Corporation, again under contract, to release
| Version 2 in 1992. Since the mid-1980's, IBM has poured massive
| development into AIX, which got so stable and feature-rich that
| when IBM tried to switch to Linux prematurely in 2005, its
| customers' and their systems administrators complained until
| IBM's Linux deployment was shelved for nearly a decade in
| deference to AIX (5, 6 & 7), and never really went away; AIX is
| still under active development.
| dosman33 wrote:
| Heh, yea I was sorely disappointed when I switched from
| primarily admining AIX to Linux for work. While I had played
| with Linux long before I got started with AIX, I had only ever
| used it on desktop workstations and such. Lots of things like
| ethernet channel bonding that worked fine out of the box on AIX
| took endless hours of fiddling to get it to sort of work under
| Linux.
| guenthert wrote:
| Hmmh? It's pretty well documented in
| Documentation/networking/bonding.txt in the Linux kernel
| source tree I thought. I needed our Linux boxes to do bonding
| somewhere in the 2011-2012 time frame. I don't recall much of
| a headache.
|
| (edit: I misremembered the project/time frame)
| classichasclass wrote:
| As an AIX admin since 3.2.5 and someone who personally owns
| AIX hardware, when it comes to device support in AIX it
| either works perfectly or not at all.
| macksd wrote:
| "Brought" is the past tense tense of "bring", not "buy". I
| think you're missing the 'r' when you read that.
| Maursault wrote:
| missed the r. Aren't I illiterate?
| classichasclass wrote:
| Still a great history though.
| macksd wrote:
| Some would miss another and say "ain't" :)
| panick21_ wrote:
| Its kind of funny that IBM was part of OSF but still continued
| with AIX.
| dark-star wrote:
| 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?
| als0 wrote:
| Part of the reason is that Itanium hardware has always been
| expensive. You need the full hardware to compare against (not
| just CPU but also to test firmware and OS). A number of years
| ago I was interested in kickstarting QEMU development for it by
| building on the existing work and adding a new virtual
| platform. But HP Itanium hardware in Europe is still
| prohibitively expensive for me and disappears quickly.
| cbmuser wrote:
| > I still wonder why neither qemu nor any other (open-source)
| emulator ever tackled Itanium emulation.
|
| There is actually some work on adding ia64 emulation support to
| qemu, see:
|
| > https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64
| pram wrote:
| It doesn't really run anything interesting, I'd guess. PA-RISC
| HPUX can be run on qemu already, if you want the ancient crappy
| HP flavored UNIX experience for some reason.
| toast0 wrote:
| I'd guess there's no motivation for an Itanium emulator,
| because there's no exciting application or system that was
| exclusively for Itanium.
|
| MAME emulates a host of odd things because fun games run on
| those odd things and people would like to play those without
| having the hardware. You can run AIX on lots of hardware, so
| running it on emulated Itanium wouldn't be very fun.
| lizknope wrote:
| My first experience with Unix was when I went to a new high
| school in 1991 and they had an IBM RT running AIX. This used the
| ROMP CPU before the POWER architecture.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC
|
| People would telnet in to it from DOS machines on the campus
| network but it was great sitting in front of the machine with a
| huge 17" color monitor and multiple terminals.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there was an AIX setup at UC Berkeley campus around 1987 with
| that big monitor.. a glimpse of the future in a way; thinking
| of it now, maybe primary authors were in contact with the grad
| advisors or something .. networking was more specific in those
| days, so hard to tell from the outside what the deals were..
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