Virtualizing AIX 1.3 - WAS::::Re: AIX for IBM PS/2

[Guy Sotomayor]

> On Feb 4, 2016, at 12:18 AM, Jonathan Katz <jon at jonworld.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 9:15 AM, Jerry Kemp <other at oryx.us> wrote:
>> All this AIX 1.x on Intel talk has me wanting to look at it deeper.
>> 
>> Does anyone have AIX 1.3 running on VirtualBox ?
>> 
>> Thanks,
> 
> This was talked about a while back. The PS/2 (x86) version of AIX
> required some specific hardware with an MCA bus and oddball SCSI chips
> that are not emulated in any modern emulator (VMWare, VirtualBox,
> etc.) Supposedly there was a later beta version of AIX for x86 that
> had support for more standard ISA and SCSI hardware but it never made
> it outside IBM.

Yes, the SCSI adapters that worked on AIX PS/2 were the “spock” and
“tribble” boards.  They were “intelligent” adapters.  The OS would build up
a high level list of commands and write the address of the start of the 
command list to the card.  The card would do all the requisite DMAs to get
the command list and data and generate an interrupt when the command
list was complete.

There was some work to take the AIX PS/2 SCSI subsystem (I wrote it) and
make it work on Adaptec SCSI controllers.  However, that work was never
productized.  I was moving off of the AIX PS/2 at that time to help start the
team that would eventually do the IBM Microkernel product and OS/2 for the
PowerPC.

TTFN - Guy