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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 bi
by 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 agoWhy can’t they just emulate the abi on Linux
- skissane 4y agoIBM 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)