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IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) a.k.a. Project Monterey Runs Again
- mrlonglong 4y agoTo bootstrap GCC all you need is Linux. Crosscompile GCC on Linux to generate a set of binaries and install on AIX. Job done.
- hapless 4y agoCross-compiling for AIX+IA64+COFF is going to be tricky. I rather doubt binutils supports that particular combination of items
- klodolph 4y ago*** Configuration ia64-ibm-aix is obsolete.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.
- mrlonglong 4y agoIn this case, I think all he wants is a working toolchain, so a version that's relatively recent will be fine, I'm sure.
- sys_64738 4y agoIt'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 4y agoAIX is still developed in Austin.
- sys_64738 4y agoDefine "developed".
- raverbashing 4y agoThey get the maintenance money of people still running apps on there while changing/fixing one thing or another a year.
- hapless 4y agoRS/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 4y agoHow related to one another were those though? I remember AIX being expanded to “Any IBM UNIX”.
- classichasclass 4y agoNot 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.
- kristopolous 4y agoAIX was/is one of the few big commercial unixes I've never got to touch, is it worth it?
- ourmandave 4y agoNo. 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."
- SpaceInvader 4y agoI 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 4y agoI'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 4y agoDoes 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.
- icedchai 4y agoAIX 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!
- inkyoto 4y ago
- Maursault 4y ago>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.
- macksd 4y ago"Brought" is the past tense tense of "bring", not "buy". I think you're missing the 'r' when you read that.
- Maursault 4y agomissed the r. Aren't I illiterate?
- macksd 4y agoSome would miss another and say "ain't" :)
- classichasclass 4y agoStill a great history though.
- dosman33 4y agoHeh, 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.
- qubex 4y agoBack 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 4y agoi 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.
- devstar 4y agoPerhaps you are remembering the System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) GUI? https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/txseries/8.2?topic=SSAL2T_8.2.0/com.ibm.cics.tx.doc/t_smit_usg.html https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/txseries/8.2?topic=SSAL2T_8.2.0/...
- mech422 4y agoI 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 4y agoIBM GUIs were always pretty interesting. The cursor in early ThinkPad BIOS was a bird that flapped its wings.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago> the lil 'running man' in SMIT would fall over if a command failed To anyone wondering: https://youtu.be/YMWSD69BWqI?t=114 https://youtu.be/YMWSD69BWqI?t=114
- dark-star 4y agoI 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?
- pram 4y agoIt 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 4y agoI'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.
- als0 4y agoPart 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 4y ago> 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 https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64
- IntelMiner 4y ago
- bitcharmer 4y agoI 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.
- lizknope 4y agoMy 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 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 4y agothere 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..
- panick21_ 4y agoIts kind of funny that IBM was part of OSF but still continued with AIX.
- mcguire 4y agoAh, memories! ;-) When AIX went multiprocessor around v.3.[45], they used a single kernel lock. Version 4 was a near complete rewrite to get rid of the single lock. I missed that fun, as I was no longer working for IBM, but I was sysadmining some AIX boxen during the 3.5-4 era. Version 3.5 had a bug. mmap()-ing a file plus some extra space and then writing to the unbacked space would extend the file on JFS (in fact, that was how write() worked in the FS), but on NFS it would corrupt a FS-level lock so that any process that touched that FS would deadlock. Including the automounter. Which was itself single-threaded. UTCS's system programming class meant daily reboots for a while. 8-) AIX v4 fixed the problem. AIX, like most Unixes, would happily allocate memory until you ran out of address space, completely unrelated to how much memory you had, because sparse matrices. The X server used this facility, for one thing. A process could tell the system not to kill it by handling a particular signal, but most of the system software didn't handle the signal. Including inetd. Which was usually the first thing killed when you ran out of memory, so you couldn't log into the system remotely.
- classichasclass 4y agoThere was an infamous memory leak with TCP sockets in 4.1.4. I came in one day in 1998 to find the kernel had killed everything off in an effort to save itself. It was successful. Fortunately that got fixed quickly.