12 Jun
2009
12 Jun
'09
7:22 a.m.
2009/6/11 Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com>:
On Jun 11, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
Fascinating stuff. Thanks for that.
I always thought that, back in the '80s, it was a real shame that IBM
didn't keep the 386 version of AIX alive and at parity with the
others. I also wish that the portable Workplace OS/2 project had been
finished, or failing that, that they'd at least open-sourced the bits
that they did complete - it strikes me that this would have been a lot
more legally likely and doable than open-sourcing OS/2 itself, with
all the MS code in it. Workplace OS/2 ran on a Unix kernel and could
have been ported to Linux, I'm sure.
But then, while I'm day-dreaming, if Stallman had gone with the notion
that GNU team had in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, that of
putting the GNU userland on the BSD-Lite kernel, then we'd have had a
working GNU OS by '91 or '92, and we'd never have ended up with the
fragmentation of HURD & Linux & NetBSD & OpenBSD & FreeBSD &
DragonflyBSD and so on...
--
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2009/6/11 Guy Sotomayor <ggs at
shiresoft.com>:
It depends upon which variation of AIX you're talking about. ?I've dealt
with AIX/370, AIX PS/2, AIX RT, AIX V3.x and later. ?With the exception of
AIX/370 & AIX PS/2, they all used completely different code bases. ?What I
was referring to (because that's what most people consider these days) is
AIX V3.x and later. ?Those versions only ran (runs) on RS/6000 and later
Power machines.
The code base for AIX V3.x and later started out as some derivative of the
AT&T code but the base kernel never was (except possibly some of the
subsystems). ?The control program itself was completely alien to the AT&T
code base. ?The entire structure was based upon (at the time) the Power's
nearly unlimited virtual address space (52 bits). ?The 64-bit version has an
80 bit virtual address space. ?So the way the kernel was organized was to
assume that address space was free. ?Need an array, allocate the address
space for it statically and let the VM fault in physical memory as it's
needed (which is also alien to most Unix implementations).
The AIX control program was mainly written by 2 folks from Watson Research.
TTFN - Guy In reality, AIX is the ultimate Unix clone since
it's one of the few
Unix-like OS' that is actually be branded as Unix(tm) by X/Open.
ISTR it uses a real licensed kernel, or at least, did Way Back When?.