20 Oct
2011
20 Oct
'11
7:39 p.m.
It's been ported /from/ POWER at least three
times.
There was an x86 port of AIX (v2, IIRC) in the late '80s, but it
didn't get anywhere and was axed. (*Checks*) It was done by Locus
Corp, says Wikipedia, not IBM.
Then there was AIX/370 for the System/370, also fairly short-lived.
AIX was also ported to the i960. The high speed NSFnet (T3 based,
basically, from 1990 or so, later called ANSnet) used RPQ'd RS/6000s
(POWERserver 930) as routers, using "Hawthorne" cards to do all the
routing dirty work. These router cards sat on the 930's MCA bus, with
each card being an network interface - Ethernet, V.35, HSSI, or FDDI.
These "Hawthorne" cards ran a stripped down AIX, originally on i386,
but later i960. From roughly 1991 through 1998, quite a lot of the
Internet backbone traffic was routed by these i960 based cards.
IBM eventually released the Ethernet and V.35 router cards as a real
product, as part of a little RS/6000-turned-router product - and I can
not remember the machine type number. I do not think the HSSI or FDDI
cards went on to be real products. I was responsible for stripping the
930s of these cards for shipment back to IBM to be destroyed. I was
not very responsible.
Anyway, one of the original design goals of AIX was to be easily
ported to different architectures.
--
Will