9 ms·

IBM shifts remaining US-based AIX dev jobs to India – source

117 points by jandeboevrie 4y ago

habitue 4y ago
I am curious, for people who are familiar with AIX and Linux, what are the main differences day to day?
- chologrande 4y ago
  Storage, Virtualization, and general UX are just completely different. Standard unix utilities are either not available or just different enough to make life hard.
  - johnklos 4y ago
    The standard Unix utilities on AIX are a pain as well.
- envp 4y ago
  Best summarized by this quote from a coworker: “AIX is what you’d get if aliens implemented a UNIX.” Utilities exist, but they tend to be different. There’s also oddities like the compiler (xlC) emitting code that is able to dereference null pointers, with the zero page. It’s a valid but odd choice of undefined behavior. [1] [1]: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.c/c/OJwY1pWFYhE https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.c/c/OJwY1pWFYhE
  - sllabres 4y ago
    This is a old quote and IIRC was e.g. for the way AIX handles services (SRC / System Resource Controller) and stores configuration data (ODM / Object Data Manager). It felt 'alien' for admins used to use rc scripts (which are possible too) and files in /etc (used in aix too). Now, nearly three decades later, we have even more automated and integrated mechanism 'systemd' and I think that there would be still features worth adopting from AIX. Not the first time i have such thoughts with an OS slowly vanishing.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > “AIX is what you’d get if aliens implemented a UNIX.” The first version of AIX, for the IBM RT PC, actually ran on top of a microkernel written in PL/I, called VRM - how’s that for alien. Subsequent versions moved closer to the Unix mainstream by dropping the PL/I microkernel.
- Tor3 4y ago
  Yes, storage and virtualisation, as was said, but that sounds less different than it actually is. It feels more like a mini vs mainframe difference. AIX is vastly larger in that respect on AIX 7 than on AIX 5L, for example. IBM seems to have invested a lot of effort into making AIX huge in VM, clustering, storage, and more . AIX 7 is much more into this than e.g. AIX 5L. As for standard Unix tools - or rather "Linux" or OSS tools these days - they are not that difficult to find and are for the most part readily available. IBM used to supply a lot of that directly, but these can be found elsewhere and for myself I work on AIX more or less as I would on Linux. When that's said, if you don't actually need the AIX-specific features you can as well run Linux. But if what that site indicates is correct then I'm a bit surprised - IBM seems to have invested a lot in those "differences" the last couple of decades and it's strange if they're abandoning that, or planning to - yes, you can run Linux on IBM hardware, but then.. why? Sounds to me they'll lose HW sales if they abandon AIX. Their strategy has been to make the system more and more Linux-like in many ways (compiler has gcc-compatible options, as one example), but at the same time add large-scale features which Linux doesn't have. Which is clearly why AIX has survived while none of the others have (IRIX, Solaris, Tru64..) - those Unix systems didn't really bring anything more than a Linux system could. AIX does.
  - sllabres 4y ago
    > you can run Linux on IBM hardware, but then.. why? Don't know if this counts, but you get much memory with fewer cores. For software where licensing is coupled to cores this quickly gets cheaper. And for what I see in production the hardware is more reliable in comparison to two large x86 vendors. This is of course based on a small number of systems (n~100)
- bitcharmer 4y ago
  Complete lack of standard tooling and GNU utilities. Even the tools that seem to have been "ported", like ps looked like work in progress rather than something intended for production use. AIX was a steaming pile of shite for a Linux or Free BSD power user.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  A big difference is that toolchain is somehow related to how Windows works as they are both COFF based. So you also get shared libraries with private by default and import libraries for example. It also supports lazy loading of dynamic libraries, where the OS implicitly loads dynamic libraries when it hits an import stub.
- skissane 4y ago
  I remember years ago having to port some C code I wrote to AIX. Hit this really weird bug - on AIX, errno is not thread-safe by default! Solution is simple: add -D_THREAD_SAFE or -D_THREAD_SAFE_ERRNO to CFLAGS. Took me a few hours of scratching my head before I worked it out though.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > Hit this really weird bug - on AIX, errno is not thread-safe by default! Isn't that a conforming implementation? (IIRC[1], errno is thread-local, not necessarily race-safe. i.e. it's visible to interrupts, which could change it) [1] No doubt someone will correct me if that is wrong.
    - jabl 4y ago
      Many old-school unixes were developed in the single-thread days. When they added support for threads they were an opt-in feature, like the above macro definitions, and using libraries like libc_r.so instead of libc.so, and so on. AIX even had compiler wrappers like xlc_r which set the relevant preprocessor macros and linked in the correct runtime libraries. When the Linux glibc 2.x/NPTL ABI was taken into use, it was clear that threads were not a passing fad and stuff was made multi-thread (to the extent the API can enable that, of course) by default, so there was no need for carrying around both a single-thread ABI and a multi-thread ABI.
    - skissane 4y ago
      > IIRC[1], errno is thread-local, not necessarily race-safe. i.e. it's visible to interrupts, which could change it) On AIX, errno is not thread-local by default, it is a global variable shared by all threads. Only if you set one of those two defines, does it become a thread-local variable. On every other platform I’ve ever written code for, errno is thread-local by default and no special define is needed to make it so. Hence, when you port to AIX, if you don’t know about those defines, you can get all these weird race condition bugs related to error handling, because suddenly errno isn’t thread-local any more
- sys_64738 4y ago
  AIX command line was so cryptic that everybody used SMIT to figure out the commands. You then copied/pasted from there. Linux never had such a tool.
unethical_ban 4y ago
I remember a fellow student in the late 2000s who suggested she was being recruited by IBM to do kernel work, presumably on AIX. I wonder. Is there any enterprise that looks to shift work into non Linux, non windows, in 2023?
- sofixa 4y ago
  > I wonder. Is there any enterprise that looks to shift work into non Linux, non windows, in 2023? Does Serverless (FaaS/CaaS/WASM) count? There might be organisations looking to move some workloads to *BSD (for instance storage or networking - famously Netflix run FreeBSD for their networking). With regards to Windows, is there anyone switching workloads to Windows? I was under the impression that doesn't really happen anymore, Windows Server being kind of a legacy product (MS retired the slimest deployment, Nano, and features in new releases are nothing special), Azure supporting Linux well and .NET Core supporting Linux well.
  - Stranger43 4y ago
    There is still a fair amount of small business dotNET software being written that kind of require windows server but that's mostly targeting standalone desktop application or spreadsheet abuses, but for anything that needs high end servers and advanced storage in order to meet performance Linux is pretty much all of the market right now. There is some niche's in the network space where xBSD plus custom asic's plays a role, due to licensing concerns but more and more vendors are finding a way to do something similar with linux. And as FaaS/CaaS in practice depends on a set of Linux kernel API's those deployments are still Linux clusters underneath all of the obfuscating complexity layers that 90% of people don't actually need, nor benefit from.
  - quanticle 4y ago
    Does Serverless (FaaS/CaaS/WASM) count? I'm not sure it does, because the servers that "serverless" programs run on are overwhelmingly Linux.
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    That's a good question. I think it's fair to call some of the true cloud native services an OS, in that you are loading programs into a framework, which stores state in a particular cloud-specific API database, and storing data in cloud-specific API objects (S3). I was thinking more about the lower level though; that is, the OS of the bare metal.
hlandau 4y ago
It's worth noting that IBM i has a kind of dependency on AIX. IBM i has an AIX binary compatibility environment called AIX. Think of it like WSL, but for AIX binaries and on IBM i. Of course if they created this compatibility layer today they'd probably choose to make it compatible with Linux rather than AIX, but they chose AIX and now they're stuck with it. This means AIX, or at least the AIX ABIs as supported by IBM i, has to be kept alive for as long as IBM i is alive. So either this bodes badly for IBM i or they consider the amount of ongoing maintenance that PASE needs to be so small it can be handled on an ongoing basis by the i or the new skeleton AIX team. I suspect the latter rather than them canning IBM i though.
- leoh 4y ago
  Why can’t they just emulate the abi on Linux
  - skissane 4y ago
    IBM i PASE is just running (some of) the AIX userspace on top of a radically different kernel. Same basic idea as WSL1 (as opposed to WSL2). They could have it run the Linux userspace instead, but that would be a lot of work to emulate its differences from AIX, and would break backward compatibility with existing PASE applications. It isn’t clear what the benefit of making that change would be (as of today, as opposed to back when they first developed it-we can’t change the past). What it does mean though, is IBM i PASE is reliant on AIX user space development for its own progress (if there will be any)
pavlov 4y ago
> “… AIX 5L was where it started to feel "legacy" and unloved” AIX 5L was released in 2001 and the ‘L’ stood for Linux. So the writing has been on the wall for a very long time.
marcodiego 4y ago
I think linux has been the great proprietary unix killer. Not that I'm bad mouthing linux, but I blame it for the death of both Solaris and IRIX. Looking forward to see preempt_rt merged. This will certainly put a lot of pressure on QNX and VxWorks in the future.
- sgt 4y ago
  Linux didn't kill Solaris alone. Sun Microsystems started doing that (as much as we loved Sun), and then Oracle put the lid on the coffin.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    Once Linux was mature enough to do all the shared hosting tasks Solaris previously owned, using dirt cheap commodity PCs, Sun was finished.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      They had some good tech they could have leveraged if they wanted to. OpenSolaris just came too late, was released too slowly and used an organisation which was too complex and made little sense to the community. Sun demised is actually a brilliant case study of what a good engineering company shouldn't do. Great products all around, aweful commercial strategy and corporate leadership.
      - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
        > Great products all around It would help them a lot if their products did not commoditize their own products as well.
- raesene9 4y ago
  For me, one of the main reasons that Linux replaced proprietary Unix in a lot of places is, ease of learning. It's simple and cheap to get started with Linux and as a result there are lots of people who know about it, so it's very easy to hire people with Linux skills. In comparison, getting started with Solaris/HPUX/AIX can be expensive, you might need a physical workstation, getting patches without paying might be tricky etc. Mainframes have the same problem. I tried to learn more about mainframe security back in the early 2000's and it was really difficult to get any access to a mainframe to practice/look at things, despite working for a large bank which had multiple mainframes.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
> but newly migrating to AIX is increasingly more trouble than it's worth paying for. Was this a thing even a decade ago? AIX felt like it was in maintenance mode for much longer to me. From my limited perspective, it looked like the vast majority moved to just using Linux, maybe FreeBSD, and buying some batteries-included appliance for anything you couldn't easily self-host and maintain.
- Stranger43 4y ago
  I don't think i have ever even heard of an unix to FreeBSD migration being done by an large commercial organization, and there is virtually no commercial enterprise software being certified for FreeBSD. It's one of those things where nostalgic old Unix admins who's not really ready to embrace the anarchy of the Linux ecosystem is kind of pretending some clean old fashioned alternative exist, and cling to the myth that FreeBSD is more of an Unix(tm) Successor then Linux. And yes i have also not really heard of greenfield Unix(tm) deployments since maybe 2008 and even then Linux was clearly where most people went when their old custom minicomputer(think DEC PDP 20, AS400 and HP3000) systems had to be replaced by something a bit more standardized.
  - pram 4y ago
    We were still doing 'tons' (relatively speaking) of new Solaris on SPARC deployments at Oracle when I was there 7 years ago. They sold an appliance called the SuperCluster that was all Solaris. Someone was buying them lol
    - sys_64738 4y ago
      I think SC was built on top of LDoms if I recall rightly. Been too long.
- martintietz 4y ago
  AIX is still the go-to platform for a bunch of financial institutations (banks and insurance companies). Although there are a lot of companies within that sector that slowly move to Linux on x86 I know from first hand experience that there are also still a lot of enterprises that swear by running their Oracle/Db2/SAP workloads on AIX on Power.
Nursie 4y ago
IBM over the last two decades really seems to be a story of managed decline. Its proprietary systems were riding high in the 90s (even if market-share wasn't the absolute largest, their "Big Iron" had a good reputation amongst 'serious' IT folks), but were superseded by linux and commodity hardware at some point in the 00s. They sold off the thinkpad business as non-core, and they sold off their commodity server business (x-series) at some point too. Both hardware and software solutions have been de-emphasised in favour of 'services', and while that's fine in a business sense, it's so sad from the perspective of all that big blue has done for our industry over the years. Yes, they now own RedHat, but large acquisitions are part of this story. Each one stems the decline for a while, but cost-cutting and streamlining inside big blue eventually manages the new addition into a shadow of its former self. Maybe this one will be different ... I hope so.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > They sold off the thinkpad business as non-core, and they sold off their commodity server business (x-series) at some point too. In a sane world, they would be spun-off and let prosper as their own entities. > Both hardware and software solutions have been de-emphasised in favour of 'services', and while that's fine in a business sense, it's so sad from the perspective of all that big blue has done for our industry over the years. It looks like MBA philosophy screwing up everything by optimizing 'numbers' as if those numbers have no connection to real life. Very optimal in the short run, but catastophic irrelevancy in the long run. But hey - at least IBM shareholders got maximum returns for some time, and that's all that matters right...
raverbashing 4y ago
Funny how I'm sure this will catch some IBM customers "by surprise" but the only thing slowest than them are their customers Yeah maybe now it's ok to move to Linux. But hey, sure, you do you
deng 4y ago
> I've run personal installations of AIX as my primary personal server since 1998, first on an Apple Network Server 500 and now on a 8203-E4A POWER6 p520 I wonder what the idle power consumption of a p520 is, but I guess he doesn't have to pay for it...
EagnaIonat 4y ago
They bought RedHat and have been pushing it. So this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
pram 4y ago
The Linux support was awful anyway. They provided an AIX version of RPM. Just RPM, not yum, nor any repos, so installing anything beyond the stuff they gave you was a nightmare reminiscent of the late 90s.
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  They have Yum and repo support now. I don't know when it was added though.
jabl 4y ago
Seems the plan is to milk captive customers as long as possible with minimal investment. Also, a few years ago they announced that the XL series of compilers were being rebased on LLVM/clang. Of course they claimed it was to enable innovation or some similar PR mumbo-jumbo and not cost-cutting, but, well..
- frozenport 4y ago
  Why not both innovation and cost cutting? Reproducing LLVM requires some crazy motivation?
  - jabl 4y ago
    > Why not both innovation and cost cutting? Ideally yes, but has anybody seen any indication that this is actually happening in this case? Until we see such a thing, I think people have reason to be skeptical. > Reproducing LLVM requires some crazy motivation? Oh, absolutely. While a LLVM monopoly isn't desirable either, unless you have some different vision of how to architect a compiler, reinventing the LLVM wheel probably isn't particularly useful.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lowken 4y ago
I’ve worked on AIX (Mohegan Sun Casino in the late 90s). Switching between AIX and Linux as a developer is not difficult. They are are both just different flavors of Unix.
red-iron-pine 4y ago
Presumably because their domestic US unix support -- and focus -- will be on Red Hat, cuz IBM owns RHEL.
exabrial 4y ago
To me this makes a lot of sense these days. American tech workers are demanding full time remote positions at rates 4x-6x what some Indian workers are willing to work for. They’re educated, professional, and showing up with a good work ethic. If a company is going through the hassle of remote workers, they might as well optimize your labor costs.
- jason2323 4y ago
  The quality of work is, and has been, subpar in my experience
  - pdksam 4y ago
    You get what you pay for.
  - cocoland2 4y ago
    both the comments are generalizations :), AIX development and support has been happening from IBM Labs India for a long time (Had some former colleagues who were into it) & if anything platforms like AIX are legacy Unix flavors that will probably not get a lot of people who'd be excited about that.
encoderer 4y ago
Last year we signed one of the large Indian outsourcing firms as a customer. The team we worked with ran fleets of AIX boxes for their customers, running their legacy systems. There was a strict requirement not to change the disk image the boxes were generated from. Our most popular integration method is a cross platform golang binary. Unfortunately, we used some key dependencies that would not compile for AIX so we had to abandon that route. We ended up extending our shell scripting integration to use the OpenSSL http client instead of the usual curl. It meant that when sending requests we literally have to prepare and concatenate all the headers, but it works, and we are monitoring all the background jobs on the very old machines, giving the team a way to address operational problems without waiting for reports from their customer.
cf100clunk 4y ago
I'm not seeing comments about the quality of India's customer-facing pro-grade IT staff here. I've been out of the Unix sysadmin game for a few years but I'll just go ahead and say that IMHO they seemed to be excellently educated and trained, with most workers being multilingual and multicultural. Is IBM making a mistake moving AIX dev jobs there? I am certain that they would not make such a change without considering the quality of the staff there.
- skissane 4y ago
  There are some excellent engineers based in India - but they are in high-demand, and you have to be willing to pay above-average (by Indian standards) to retain them. And some people aren’t keen on doing that, because they think “India was supposed to be cheap, why pay this engineer so much, that isn’t really that ‘cheap’!” But if that thinking wins, one ends up with an India team without any excellent engineers… I have no idea what IBM is doing though. I know when Microsoft moved SFU/SUA (the legacy pre-WSL Unix compatibility subsystem) development to India, the product quality went massively downhill-probably because they didn’t budget enough to hire and retain enough sufficiently skilled developers. That’s the big risk with moving stuff to a low-cost country - if you do it “on the cheap”, it will be a disaster. But since the whole idea was to cut costs and pursue “cheapness”, the temptation to do that is there
nateb2022 4y ago
Duplicate submission. I submitted this exact same article 4 hours prior to this submission.[0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34395790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34395790
chudiok9 4y ago
With edge and Microsoft latest os might have some difficulty linking with Windows computers. Trust IBM to make this a smooth transition in the computing world

117 points by jandeboevrie 4y ago

habitue 4y ago

I am curious, for people who are familiar with AIX and Linux, what are the main differences day to day?

chologrande 4y ago
Storage, Virtualization, and general UX are just completely different. Standard unix utilities are either not available or just different enough to make life hard.
- johnklos 4y ago
  The standard Unix utilities on AIX are a pain as well.
envp 4y ago
Best summarized by this quote from a coworker: “AIX is what you’d get if aliens implemented a UNIX.” Utilities exist, but they tend to be different. There’s also oddities like the compiler (xlC) emitting code that is able to dereference null pointers, with the zero page. It’s a valid but odd choice of undefined behavior. [1] [1]: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.c/c/OJwY1pWFYhE https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.c/c/OJwY1pWFYhE
- sllabres 4y ago
  This is a old quote and IIRC was e.g. for the way AIX handles services (SRC / System Resource Controller) and stores configuration data (ODM / Object Data Manager). It felt 'alien' for admins used to use rc scripts (which are possible too) and files in /etc (used in aix too). Now, nearly three decades later, we have even more automated and integrated mechanism 'systemd' and I think that there would be still features worth adopting from AIX. Not the first time i have such thoughts with an OS slowly vanishing.
- skissane 4y ago
  > “AIX is what you’d get if aliens implemented a UNIX.” The first version of AIX, for the IBM RT PC, actually ran on top of a microkernel written in PL/I, called VRM - how’s that for alien. Subsequent versions moved closer to the Unix mainstream by dropping the PL/I microkernel.
Tor3 4y ago
Yes, storage and virtualisation, as was said, but that sounds less different than it actually is. It feels more like a mini vs mainframe difference. AIX is vastly larger in that respect on AIX 7 than on AIX 5L, for example. IBM seems to have invested a lot of effort into making AIX huge in VM, clustering, storage, and more . AIX 7 is much more into this than e.g. AIX 5L. As for standard Unix tools - or rather "Linux" or OSS tools these days - they are not that difficult to find and are for the most part readily available. IBM used to supply a lot of that directly, but these can be found elsewhere and for myself I work on AIX more or less as I would on Linux. When that's said, if you don't actually need the AIX-specific features you can as well run Linux. But if what that site indicates is correct then I'm a bit surprised - IBM seems to have invested a lot in those "differences" the last couple of decades and it's strange if they're abandoning that, or planning to - yes, you can run Linux on IBM hardware, but then.. why? Sounds to me they'll lose HW sales if they abandon AIX. Their strategy has been to make the system more and more Linux-like in many ways (compiler has gcc-compatible options, as one example), but at the same time add large-scale features which Linux doesn't have. Which is clearly why AIX has survived while none of the others have (IRIX, Solaris, Tru64..) - those Unix systems didn't really bring anything more than a Linux system could. AIX does.
- sllabres 4y ago
  > you can run Linux on IBM hardware, but then.. why? Don't know if this counts, but you get much memory with fewer cores. For software where licensing is coupled to cores this quickly gets cheaper. And for what I see in production the hardware is more reliable in comparison to two large x86 vendors. This is of course based on a small number of systems (n~100)
bitcharmer 4y ago
Complete lack of standard tooling and GNU utilities. Even the tools that seem to have been "ported", like ps looked like work in progress rather than something intended for production use. AIX was a steaming pile of shite for a Linux or Free BSD power user.
pjmlp 4y ago
A big difference is that toolchain is somehow related to how Windows works as they are both COFF based. So you also get shared libraries with private by default and import libraries for example. It also supports lazy loading of dynamic libraries, where the OS implicitly loads dynamic libraries when it hits an import stub.
skissane 4y ago
I remember years ago having to port some C code I wrote to AIX. Hit this really weird bug - on AIX, errno is not thread-safe by default! Solution is simple: add -D_THREAD_SAFE or -D_THREAD_SAFE_ERRNO to CFLAGS. Took me a few hours of scratching my head before I worked it out though.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > Hit this really weird bug - on AIX, errno is not thread-safe by default! Isn't that a conforming implementation? (IIRC[1], errno is thread-local, not necessarily race-safe. i.e. it's visible to interrupts, which could change it) [1] No doubt someone will correct me if that is wrong.
  - jabl 4y ago
    Many old-school unixes were developed in the single-thread days. When they added support for threads they were an opt-in feature, like the above macro definitions, and using libraries like libc_r.so instead of libc.so, and so on. AIX even had compiler wrappers like xlc_r which set the relevant preprocessor macros and linked in the correct runtime libraries. When the Linux glibc 2.x/NPTL ABI was taken into use, it was clear that threads were not a passing fad and stuff was made multi-thread (to the extent the API can enable that, of course) by default, so there was no need for carrying around both a single-thread ABI and a multi-thread ABI.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > IIRC[1], errno is thread-local, not necessarily race-safe. i.e. it's visible to interrupts, which could change it) On AIX, errno is not thread-local by default, it is a global variable shared by all threads. Only if you set one of those two defines, does it become a thread-local variable. On every other platform I’ve ever written code for, errno is thread-local by default and no special define is needed to make it so. Hence, when you port to AIX, if you don’t know about those defines, you can get all these weird race condition bugs related to error handling, because suddenly errno isn’t thread-local any more
sys_64738 4y ago
AIX command line was so cryptic that everybody used SMIT to figure out the commands. You then copied/pasted from there. Linux never had such a tool.

unethical_ban 4y ago

I remember a fellow student in the late 2000s who suggested she was being recruited by IBM to do kernel work, presumably on AIX. I wonder. Is there any enterprise that looks to shift work into non Linux, non windows, in 2023?

sofixa 4y ago
> I wonder. Is there any enterprise that looks to shift work into non Linux, non windows, in 2023? Does Serverless (FaaS/CaaS/WASM) count? There might be organisations looking to move some workloads to *BSD (for instance storage or networking - famously Netflix run FreeBSD for their networking). With regards to Windows, is there anyone switching workloads to Windows? I was under the impression that doesn't really happen anymore, Windows Server being kind of a legacy product (MS retired the slimest deployment, Nano, and features in new releases are nothing special), Azure supporting Linux well and .NET Core supporting Linux well.
- Stranger43 4y ago
  There is still a fair amount of small business dotNET software being written that kind of require windows server but that's mostly targeting standalone desktop application or spreadsheet abuses, but for anything that needs high end servers and advanced storage in order to meet performance Linux is pretty much all of the market right now. There is some niche's in the network space where xBSD plus custom asic's plays a role, due to licensing concerns but more and more vendors are finding a way to do something similar with linux. And as FaaS/CaaS in practice depends on a set of Linux kernel API's those deployments are still Linux clusters underneath all of the obfuscating complexity layers that 90% of people don't actually need, nor benefit from.
- quanticle 4y ago
  Does Serverless (FaaS/CaaS/WASM) count? I'm not sure it does, because the servers that "serverless" programs run on are overwhelmingly Linux.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  That's a good question. I think it's fair to call some of the true cloud native services an OS, in that you are loading programs into a framework, which stores state in a particular cloud-specific API database, and storing data in cloud-specific API objects (S3). I was thinking more about the lower level though; that is, the OS of the bare metal.

hlandau 4y ago

It's worth noting that IBM i has a kind of dependency on AIX. IBM i has an AIX binary compatibility environment called AIX. Think of it like WSL, but for AIX binaries and on IBM i. Of course if they created this compatibility layer today they'd probably choose to make it compatible with Linux rather than AIX, but they chose AIX and now they're stuck with it. This means AIX, or at least the AIX ABIs as supported by IBM i, has to be kept alive for as long as IBM i is alive. So either this bodes badly for IBM i or they consider the amount of ongoing maintenance that PASE needs to be so small it can be handled on an ongoing basis by the i or the new skeleton AIX team. I suspect the latter rather than them canning IBM i though.

leoh 4y ago
Why can’t they just emulate the abi on Linux
- skissane 4y ago
  IBM i PASE is just running (some of) the AIX userspace on top of a radically different kernel. Same basic idea as WSL1 (as opposed to WSL2). They could have it run the Linux userspace instead, but that would be a lot of work to emulate its differences from AIX, and would break backward compatibility with existing PASE applications. It isn’t clear what the benefit of making that change would be (as of today, as opposed to back when they first developed it-we can’t change the past). What it does mean though, is IBM i PASE is reliant on AIX user space development for its own progress (if there will be any)

pavlov 4y ago

> “… AIX 5L was where it started to feel "legacy" and unloved” AIX 5L was released in 2001 and the ‘L’ stood for Linux. So the writing has been on the wall for a very long time.

marcodiego 4y ago

I think linux has been the great proprietary unix killer. Not that I'm bad mouthing linux, but I blame it for the death of both Solaris and IRIX. Looking forward to see preempt_rt merged. This will certainly put a lot of pressure on QNX and VxWorks in the future.

sgt 4y ago
Linux didn't kill Solaris alone. Sun Microsystems started doing that (as much as we loved Sun), and then Oracle put the lid on the coffin.
- pengaru 4y ago
  Once Linux was mature enough to do all the shared hosting tasks Solaris previously owned, using dirt cheap commodity PCs, Sun was finished.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    They had some good tech they could have leveraged if they wanted to. OpenSolaris just came too late, was released too slowly and used an organisation which was too complex and made little sense to the community. Sun demised is actually a brilliant case study of what a good engineering company shouldn't do. Great products all around, aweful commercial strategy and corporate leadership.
    - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
      > Great products all around It would help them a lot if their products did not commoditize their own products as well.
raesene9 4y ago
For me, one of the main reasons that Linux replaced proprietary Unix in a lot of places is, ease of learning. It's simple and cheap to get started with Linux and as a result there are lots of people who know about it, so it's very easy to hire people with Linux skills. In comparison, getting started with Solaris/HPUX/AIX can be expensive, you might need a physical workstation, getting patches without paying might be tricky etc. Mainframes have the same problem. I tried to learn more about mainframe security back in the early 2000's and it was really difficult to get any access to a mainframe to practice/look at things, despite working for a large bank which had multiple mainframes.

iforgotpassword 4y ago

> but newly migrating to AIX is increasingly more trouble than it's worth paying for. Was this a thing even a decade ago? AIX felt like it was in maintenance mode for much longer to me. From my limited perspective, it looked like the vast majority moved to just using Linux, maybe FreeBSD, and buying some batteries-included appliance for anything you couldn't easily self-host and maintain.

Stranger43 4y ago
I don't think i have ever even heard of an unix to FreeBSD migration being done by an large commercial organization, and there is virtually no commercial enterprise software being certified for FreeBSD. It's one of those things where nostalgic old Unix admins who's not really ready to embrace the anarchy of the Linux ecosystem is kind of pretending some clean old fashioned alternative exist, and cling to the myth that FreeBSD is more of an Unix(tm) Successor then Linux. And yes i have also not really heard of greenfield Unix(tm) deployments since maybe 2008 and even then Linux was clearly where most people went when their old custom minicomputer(think DEC PDP 20, AS400 and HP3000) systems had to be replaced by something a bit more standardized.
- pram 4y ago
  We were still doing 'tons' (relatively speaking) of new Solaris on SPARC deployments at Oracle when I was there 7 years ago. They sold an appliance called the SuperCluster that was all Solaris. Someone was buying them lol
  - sys_64738 4y ago
    I think SC was built on top of LDoms if I recall rightly. Been too long.
martintietz 4y ago
AIX is still the go-to platform for a bunch of financial institutations (banks and insurance companies). Although there are a lot of companies within that sector that slowly move to Linux on x86 I know from first hand experience that there are also still a lot of enterprises that swear by running their Oracle/Db2/SAP workloads on AIX on Power.

Nursie 4y ago

IBM over the last two decades really seems to be a story of managed decline. Its proprietary systems were riding high in the 90s (even if market-share wasn't the absolute largest, their "Big Iron" had a good reputation amongst 'serious' IT folks), but were superseded by linux and commodity hardware at some point in the 00s. They sold off the thinkpad business as non-core, and they sold off their commodity server business (x-series) at some point too. Both hardware and software solutions have been de-emphasised in favour of 'services', and while that's fine in a business sense, it's so sad from the perspective of all that big blue has done for our industry over the years. Yes, they now own RedHat, but large acquisitions are part of this story. Each one stems the decline for a while, but cost-cutting and streamlining inside big blue eventually manages the new addition into a shadow of its former self. Maybe this one will be different ... I hope so.

unity1001 4y ago
> They sold off the thinkpad business as non-core, and they sold off their commodity server business (x-series) at some point too. In a sane world, they would be spun-off and let prosper as their own entities. > Both hardware and software solutions have been de-emphasised in favour of 'services', and while that's fine in a business sense, it's so sad from the perspective of all that big blue has done for our industry over the years. It looks like MBA philosophy screwing up everything by optimizing 'numbers' as if those numbers have no connection to real life. Very optimal in the short run, but catastophic irrelevancy in the long run. But hey - at least IBM shareholders got maximum returns for some time, and that's all that matters right...

raverbashing 4y ago

Funny how I'm sure this will catch some IBM customers "by surprise" but the only thing slowest than them are their customers Yeah maybe now it's ok to move to Linux. But hey, sure, you do you

deng 4y ago

> I've run personal installations of AIX as my primary personal server since 1998, first on an Apple Network Server 500 and now on a 8203-E4A POWER6 p520 I wonder what the idle power consumption of a p520 is, but I guess he doesn't have to pay for it...

EagnaIonat 4y ago

They bought RedHat and have been pushing it. So this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

pram 4y ago

The Linux support was awful anyway. They provided an AIX version of RPM. Just RPM, not yum, nor any repos, so installing anything beyond the stuff they gave you was a nightmare reminiscent of the late 90s.

_-david-_ 4y ago
They have Yum and repo support now. I don't know when it was added though.

jabl 4y ago

Seems the plan is to milk captive customers as long as possible with minimal investment. Also, a few years ago they announced that the XL series of compilers were being rebased on LLVM/clang. Of course they claimed it was to enable innovation or some similar PR mumbo-jumbo and not cost-cutting, but, well..

frozenport 4y ago
Why not both innovation and cost cutting? Reproducing LLVM requires some crazy motivation?
- jabl 4y ago
  > Why not both innovation and cost cutting? Ideally yes, but has anybody seen any indication that this is actually happening in this case? Until we see such a thing, I think people have reason to be skeptical. > Reproducing LLVM requires some crazy motivation? Oh, absolutely. While a LLVM monopoly isn't desirable either, unless you have some different vision of how to architect a compiler, reinventing the LLVM wheel probably isn't particularly useful.
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lowken 4y ago

I’ve worked on AIX (Mohegan Sun Casino in the late 90s). Switching between AIX and Linux as a developer is not difficult. They are are both just different flavors of Unix.

red-iron-pine 4y ago

Presumably because their domestic US unix support -- and focus -- will be on Red Hat, cuz IBM owns RHEL.

exabrial 4y ago

To me this makes a lot of sense these days. American tech workers are demanding full time remote positions at rates 4x-6x what some Indian workers are willing to work for. They’re educated, professional, and showing up with a good work ethic. If a company is going through the hassle of remote workers, they might as well optimize your labor costs.

jason2323 4y ago
The quality of work is, and has been, subpar in my experience
- pdksam 4y ago
  You get what you pay for.
- cocoland2 4y ago
  both the comments are generalizations :), AIX development and support has been happening from IBM Labs India for a long time (Had some former colleagues who were into it) & if anything platforms like AIX are legacy Unix flavors that will probably not get a lot of people who'd be excited about that.

encoderer 4y ago

Last year we signed one of the large Indian outsourcing firms as a customer. The team we worked with ran fleets of AIX boxes for their customers, running their legacy systems. There was a strict requirement not to change the disk image the boxes were generated from. Our most popular integration method is a cross platform golang binary. Unfortunately, we used some key dependencies that would not compile for AIX so we had to abandon that route. We ended up extending our shell scripting integration to use the OpenSSL http client instead of the usual curl. It meant that when sending requests we literally have to prepare and concatenate all the headers, but it works, and we are monitoring all the background jobs on the very old machines, giving the team a way to address operational problems without waiting for reports from their customer.

cf100clunk 4y ago

I'm not seeing comments about the quality of India's customer-facing pro-grade IT staff here. I've been out of the Unix sysadmin game for a few years but I'll just go ahead and say that IMHO they seemed to be excellently educated and trained, with most workers being multilingual and multicultural. Is IBM making a mistake moving AIX dev jobs there? I am certain that they would not make such a change without considering the quality of the staff there.

skissane 4y ago
There are some excellent engineers based in India - but they are in high-demand, and you have to be willing to pay above-average (by Indian standards) to retain them. And some people aren’t keen on doing that, because they think “India was supposed to be cheap, why pay this engineer so much, that isn’t really that ‘cheap’!” But if that thinking wins, one ends up with an India team without any excellent engineers… I have no idea what IBM is doing though. I know when Microsoft moved SFU/SUA (the legacy pre-WSL Unix compatibility subsystem) development to India, the product quality went massively downhill-probably because they didn’t budget enough to hire and retain enough sufficiently skilled developers. That’s the big risk with moving stuff to a low-cost country - if you do it “on the cheap”, it will be a disaster. But since the whole idea was to cut costs and pursue “cheapness”, the temptation to do that is there

nateb2022 4y ago

Duplicate submission. I submitted this exact same article 4 hours prior to this submission.[0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34395790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34395790

chudiok9 4y ago

With edge and Microsoft latest os might have some difficulty linking with Windows computers. Trust IBM to make this a smooth transition in the computing world