AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) is a proprietary operating system developed by IBM based on UNIX System V. Before the product was ever marketed, the acronym AIX originally stood for Advanced IBM UNIX. Website - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... The term software company could be applied to; a) a company that produces software or b) a company that distributes software from a third party or c) a company that provides services for software. ... A software developer is a programmer who is concerned with one or more facets of the software development process, a somewhat broader scope of computer programming. ... Big Blue redirects here. ... It has been suggested that Traditional Unix be merged into this article or section. ... The text below is generated by a template, which has been proposed for deletion. ... The kernel is the central part in most computer operating systems because of its task, which is the management of the systems resources and the communication between hardware and software components. ... Graphical overview of a monolithic kernel A monolithic kernel defines a high-level virtual interface over the hardware, with a set of primitives or system calls to implement operating system services such as process management, concurrency, and memory management in several modules that run in supervisor mode. ... The user interface is the part of a system exposed to users. ... CDE on Unix (Solaris 8) DECwindows CDE on OpenVMS 7. ... A software license is a legal agreement which may take the form of a proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software. ... Proprietary software is software that has restrictions on using and copying it, usually enforced by a proprietor. ... Proprietary software is software that has restrictions on using and copying it, usually enforced by a proprietor. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Big Blue redirects here. ... It has been suggested that Traditional Unix be merged into this article or section. ... Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations, such as NATO, laser, and LED, written as the initial letter or letters of words, and pronounced on the basis of this abbreviated written form. ...

AIX has pioneered numerous network operating system enhancements, introducing new innovations later adopted by Unix-like operating systems; it is often one of the first operating systems to implement a new innovation in software architecture as a sophisticated software technology. Network operating system (NOS): Software that (a) controls a network and its message (e. ... A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ... Software architecture or software systems architecture can best be thought of as a representation of an engineered (or To Be Engineered) software system, and the process and discipline for effectively implementing the design(s) for such a system. ...

The scalable AIX 5L 5.3 supports up to 64 central processing units and two terabytes (TB) of random access memory. The JFS2 file system—first introduced by IBM as part of AIX—supports computer files and partitions up to 16 TB in size. In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability indicates the capability of a system to increase total througput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added. ... CPU redirects here. ... A terabyte (derived from the binary prefix tera-) is a measurement term for data storage capacity equal to 1024 gigabytes. ... A four-megabyte RAM card for the VAX 8600 computer (circa 1986). ... JFS is a journaling filesystem created by IBM. It is available under an open source license. ... In computing, a file system is a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. ... A computer file is a collection of information that is stored in a computer system and can be identified by its full path name. ... In computer engineering, hard disk drive partitioning is the creation of logical divisions upon a hard disk that allows one to apply operating system-specific logical formatting. ...

Development

AIX V1, introduced in 1986, was based on System V Release 3. IBM later ported AIX to the RS/6000 platform as AIX/6000; since 1989, AIX has served as the RS/6000's primary operating system. In developing AIX, IBM and INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation (whom IBM contracted) also incorporated source code from Berkeley Software Distribution 4.2 and 4.3. AT&T UNIX System V was one of the versions of the UNIX operating system. ... The IBM pSeries, formerly called RS/6000 (for RISC System/6000), is IBMs current RISC/UNIX-based workstation and server computer line. ... 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation (ISC) was a computer software company, known for their versions of the Unix operating system. ... Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley starting in the 1970s. ...

In the SCO v. IBM lawsuit filed in 2003, the SCO Group alleged that (among other infractions) IBM misappropriated licensed source code from UNIX System V Release 4 for incorporation into AIX; SCO subsequently withdrew IBM's license to develop and distribute AIX. IBM maintains that their license was irrevocable, and continues to sell and support the product pending the outcome of litigation. On March 6, 2003, the SCO Group (formerly known as Caldera Systems) filed a $1 billion lawsuit in the US against IBM for allegedly devaluing its version of the UNIX operating system. ... A lawsuit is a civil action brought before a court in which the party commencing the action, the plaintiff, seeks a legal remedy. ... The SCO Group, Inc. ... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... It has been suggested that Traditional Unix be merged into this article or section. ...

Supported architectures

• AIX v1 supported IBM PS/2 Micro Channel architecture PCs and the IBM RT.
• AIX v2 supported 6150-series IBM RT systems.
• AIX v3 introduced support for the IBM POWER architecture.
• AIX v4 introduced support for the PowerPC architecture and the PCI bus.
• AIX v5 introduced support for the IA64 architecture (although AIX for Itanium never went beyond beta). [1]
• AIX v5.1 introduced Logical Partitioning on POWER4, and was the last version to support the Micro Channel architecture.
• AIX v5.2 introduced support for the JS20 PowerPC 970 based blade for the IBM BladeCenter.
• AIX v5.3 introduced MicroPartitioning on POWER5.

PS/2 can refer to: IBM Personal System/2, a series of post-PC computers sold by IBM starting in 1987. ... Graphics Card IBM XGA-2. ... The IBM RT was a computer based around the PC-AT bus and IBMs ROMP processor, a spin-off of the IBM 801. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... IBM PowerPC 601 Microprocessor PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance, known as AIM. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded and high-performance processors as well. ... 32-bit PCI expansion slots on a motherboard 64-bit PCI expansion slots inside a Power Macintosh G4 The Peripheral Component Interconnect standard (in practice almost always shortened to PCI) specifies a computer bus for attaching peripheral devices to a computer motherboard. ... In computing, IA-64 (Instruction Architecture-64) is a 64-bit processor architecture developed in cooperation by Intel and Hewlett-Packard for processors such as Itanium and Itanium 2. ... DLPAR stands for Dynamic Logical Partitioning ... Graphics Card IBM XGA-2. ... PowerPC 970 In computing, the PowerPC 970, PowerPC 970FX, and PowerPC 970MP, also known as PowerPC G5, are 64-bit processors in the PowerPC family from IBM, which was introduced in 2002. ... The IBM BladeCenter is IBMs blade server architecture. ...

AIX on IBM Mainframes

In 1988, IBM announced AIX/370. AIX/370 was IBM's first attempt to offer Unix-like functionality for their mainframe line, specifically the System/370. AIX/370 was released in 1990 with functional equivalence to System V Release 2 and 4.3BSD as well as IBM enhancements. With the introduction of the ESA/390 architecture, AIX/370 was rebranded as AIX/ESA in 1991 and ran on the System/390 platform. Unlike AIX on its other platforms, AIX on the mainframe never ran as the host operating system, but rather as a guest under VM. AIX on the mainframe had little success and UNIX functionality was instead added as an option with the existing mainframe operating system, MVS, which became MVS/ESA OpenEdition in 1993. It is a little known fact that AIX, primarily available for the RS/6000, was also once available for the S/370. ... The System/370 is a model range of IBM mainframes introduced in the early 1970s as the successors to the System/360 family. ... In computer architecture, 31-bit is an adjective used to describe integers, memory addresses or other data units that are at most 31 bits (just shy of 4 octets) wide, or to describe CPU and ALU architectures based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... VM is an early and influential virtual machine operating system from IBM, apparently the first true virtual machine system. ... MVS (Multiple Virtual Storage) was the most commonly used operating system on the System/370 and System/390 IBM mainframe computers. ... MVS/ESA: MVS Enterprise System Architecture. ...

Versions

• AIX 5L 5.3, August 2004
  • NFS Version 4 support
  • Advanced Accounting
  • Virtual SCSI
  • Virtual Ethernet
  • Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) support
  • Micro-Partitioning support
  • POWER5 support
  • JFS2 quota support
  • JFS2 filesystem shrink support
• AIX 5L 5.2, October 2002
  • Minimum level required for POWER5 hardware
  • Support for MPIO Fibre Channel disks
  • iSCSI Initiator software
  • Dynamic LPAR support
• AIX 5L 5.1, May 2001
  • Minimum level required for POWER4 hardware and the last release that supported Micro Channel architecture
  • Introduction of 64-bit kernel, installed but not activated by default
  • JFS2
  • Static LPAR support
  • The L stands for Linux affinity
  • Trusted Computing Base (TCB)

• AIX 4.3.3, September 1999
  • Added online backup function
  • Workload Management ( WLM )
• AIX 4.3.2, October 1998
• AIX 4.3.1, April 1998
• AIX 4.3, October 1997
  • Support for 64-bit architecture
• AIX 4.2.1, April 1997
  • NFS Version 3 support
• AIX 4.2, May 1996
• AIX 4.1.5, August 1996
• AIX 4.1.4, October 1995
• AIX 4.1.3, July 1995
  • CDE 1.0 became the default GUI environment, replacing Motif X Window Manager.
• AIX 4.1.1, October 1994
• AIX 4.1, August 1994
• AIX v4, 1994
• AIX v3.2 1992
• AIX v3.1
  • Introduction of Journaled File System (JFS)
• AIX v3, February 1990
  • Developer release licensed only to OSF; the LVM was incorporated into OSF/1.
  • SMIT was introduced.
• AIX v2
  • last version was 2.2.1.
• AIX v1, 1986
  • last version was 1.3.

Network File System (NFS) is a protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984 and defined in RFCs 1094, 1813, and 3530 (obsoletes 3010), as a distributed file system which allows a computer to access files over a network as easily as if they were on its local disks. ... SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface, and is a standard interface and command set for transferring data between devices on both internal and external computer buses. ... Simultaneous multithreading, often abbreviated as SMT, is a technique for improving the overall efficiency of the hardware that executes instructions in a computer. ... Micro-Partitioning is a form of Logical Partitioning which was introduced by IBM on systems using the POWER5 processor. ... In computer storage, multipath I/O is an arrangement whereby there is more than one logical path between the CPU in a computer system and its mass storage devices through the buses and bridge devices connecting them. ... Fibre Channel is a gigabit speed network technology primarily used for Storage Networking. ... Internet SCSI (iSCSI) is an official standard ratified on February 11, 2003 by the Internet Engineering Task Force that allows the use of the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP networks. ... Graphics Card IBM XGA-2. ... In computing, a 64-bit component is one in which data are processed or stored in 64-bit units (words). ... The kernel is the central part in most computer operating systems because of its task, which is the management of the systems resources and the communication between hardware and software components. ... Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a Unix-like computer operating system. ... A trusted computing base (TCB) is the totality of protection mechanisms within a computer system, including hardware, firmware, and software, the combination of which is responsible for enforcing a computer security policy. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... A CPU generally has these components: Datapaths (such as ALUs and pipelines) Logic which controls the datapaths memory components such as register files, caches clock circuitry such as clock drivers, PLLs, clock distribution networks pad transceivers circuitry logic gate cell library which is used to implement the logic CPUs designed... Network File System (NFS) is a protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984 and defined in RFCs 1094, 1813, and 3530 (obsoletes 3010), as a distributed file system which allows a computer to access files over a network as easily as if they were on its local disks. ... CDE on Unix (Solaris 8) DECwindows CDE on OpenVMS 7. ... Motif (or capitalized MOTIF) is a graphical widget toolkit for building graphical user interfaces under the X Window System on UNIX and other POSIX-compliant systems. ... KDE 3. ... JFS is a journaling filesystem created by IBM. It is available under an open source license. ... SMIT stands for System Management Interface Tool ...

Interfaces

Graphical

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is AIX's default graphical user interface. As part of Linux Affinity and the free AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications (ATLA), open-source KDE and GNOME desktop are also available. CDE on Unix (Solaris 8) DECwindows CDE on OpenVMS 7. ... This article or section needs a complete rewrite for the reasons listed on the talk page. ... KDE (K Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment and development platform built with Trolltechs Qt toolkit. ... A gnome hiding behind a toadstool. ...

System Management Console

SMIT is the System Management Interface Tool for AIX. It allows a user to navigate a menu hierarchy of commands, rather than using the command line. Invocation is typically achieved with the command smit. Experienced system administrators make use of the F6 accelerator which generates the command line that SMIT will invoke to complete the proposed task. SMIT also generates a log of commands that are performed (smit.log), which can be condensed into a script for automating a series of tasks on numerous systems. SMIT stands for System Management Interface Tool ...

smit and smitty refer to the same program, though smitty invokes the text-based version, while smit will invoke an X Window based interface if possible; however, if smit determines that X Window capabilities are not present, it will present the text-based version instead of failing. Determination of X Window capabilities is typically performed by checking for the existence of the DISPLAY variable.

History

AIX Version 1

AIX version 1 was developed by IBM in conjunction with INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, and was based in part on PC/IX, an operating system from Interactive Systems that ran on IBM/PC and compatible systems. Installation media consisted of eight 1.2M floppy disks. INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation (ISC) was a computer software company, known for their versions of the Unix operating system. ... IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151). ... A 3,5 inch diskette, removed from its casing A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a ring of thin, flexible (i. ...

AIX Version 2

AIX version 2 was a port of PC/IX to the IBM/RT Unix workstation. Unlike the IBM/PC, IBM/XT and IBM/AT systems, which were based on Intel 8086 and 80286 chips, respectively, the RT was based on the ROMP chip, the first commercial RISC chip ever, based on a design, the IBM 801, pioneered at IBM Research. I/O was provided by eight ISA bus slots. A typically configured RT came with 4MB of memory, maxing out at 16MB, and with a 20MB hard drive, upgradable to 300MB or more with external SCSI cabinets. Also standard were mouse and a 1280x1024 pixel-addressible 8-bit grayscale display and either a 4MB/sec token-ring network adapter, or a 10Mbit/sec 10Base2 (coaxial cable) ethernet adapter. The IBM RT was a computer based around the PC-AT bus and IBMs ROMP processor, a spin-off of the IBM 801. ... An IBM Personal Computer XT (this is a later model with 640kb base memory and 2Mb extended memory, running MS-DOS 6. ... The IBM Personal Computer/AT (IBM 5170), more commonly known as the IBM AT and also sometimes called the PC AT or PC/AT, was IBMs second-generation PC, designed around the Intel 80286 microprocessor running at 6 MHz and released in 1984. ... It has been suggested that Microprocessor 8086 be merged into this article or section. ... The Intel 80286 is an x86-family 16-bit microprocessor that was introduced by Intel on February 1, 1982. ... The ROMP or Research (Office Products Division) Micro Processor chip, also known in some circles as 032, was first in silicon in 1981 and was originally designed to be used in office products. ... Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), is a microprocessor CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all take about the same amount of time to execute. ... The 801 was a RISC microprocessor architecture designed by IBM in the 1970s, and used in various roles in IBM until the 1980s. ... Industry Standard Architecture (in practice almost always shortened to ISA) is a bus standard for IBM compatibles introduced in 1984 that extends the XT bus architecture to 16 bits. ... Token-Ring local area network (LAN) technology was developed and promoted by IBM in the early 1980s and standardised as IEEE 802. ... 10BASE2 cable showing BNC Connector end. ... Ethernet is large and diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). ...

The performance of the RT, in comparison with other contemporaneous Unix workstations, was not outstanding. In particular, the floating point performance was poor, and was scandalized mid-life with the discovery of a bug in the floating point square root routine. Sales were also hobbled by the poor commission structure given to the IBM salesmen: it was structured along the same lines as the PC-class systems. With a typical price of about $20,000, which was much higher than the PC's, it was a hard sell. The resulting tiny commissions caused most of the IBM salesforce to be utterly disinterested in selling the product. Approximately 23,000 RTs were sold over the lifetime of the product, with some 4,000 going into IBM internal development and sales organizations. A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ...

One of the novel aspects of the RT design was the use of a microkernel. The keyboard, mouse, display, disk drives and network were all controlled by a microkernel, which allowed multiple operating systems to be booted and run at the same time. One could "hotkey" from one operating system to the next using the Alt-Tab key combination. Each OS in turn would get possession of the keyboard, mouse and display. Besides AIXv2, the PICK OS was built in this microkernel. The PICK was unique in being a unified operating system and database, and ran various accounting applications. It was popular with retail merchants, and accounted for about 4,000 units of sales. Graphical overview of a microkernel A microkernel is a minimal form of computer operating system kernel providing a set of primitives, or system calls, to implement basic operating system services such as address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication. ... The Pick operating system (often called just the Pick system or simply Pick) is a demand-paged, multiuser, virtual memory, time-sharing operating system based around a unique multivalued database. ...

Much of the AIXv2 kernel was written in the PL/I programming language, which proved troublesome during the migration to AIXv3. AIXv2 included full TCP/IP networking support, as well as SNA, and two networking file systems: NFS, licensed from Sun Microsystems, and Distributed Services or DS. DS had the distinction of being built on top of SNA, and thereby being fully compatible with DS on the IBM midrange AS/400 and mainframe systems. For the graphical user interfaces, AIXv2 came with the X10R3 and later the X10R4 and X11 versions of the X Window System from MIT, together with the Athena widget set. Compilers for Fortran and C were available. One of the more popular desktop applications was the PageMaker book publishing software. PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced pee el one) is an imperative computer programming language designed for scientific, engineering, and business applications. ... The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ... Systems Network Architecture (SNA) is IBMs proprietary networking architecture created in 1974. ... Network File System (NFS) is a protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984 and defined in RFCs 1094, 1813, and 3530 (obsoletes 3010), as a distributed file system which allows a computer to access files over a network as easily as if they were on its local disks. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... i5 Model 570 (2006) The Application System/400 (also known as AS/400, iSeries (since 2000) and System i5 (since 2006)) is a type of minicomputer produced by IBM. It was first produced in 1988 and, as of 2006, is still in production. ... KDE 3. ... Xaw is short for the Athena Widget Set. ... Fortran (also FORTRAN) is a general-purpose[1], procedural[2], imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language (often, just C) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use... PageMaker was the first desktop publishing program, introduced in 1985 by Aldus Corporation, initially for the Apple Macintosh but soon after also for the PC. It relies on Adobe Systems PostScript page description language. ...

AIX Version 3

The release of AIX version 3 coincided with the announcement of the first RS/6000 models. The RS/6000 was unique in that it not only outperformed all other machines in integer compute performance, but also beat the competition by a factor of 10 in floating-point performance.

AIXv3 innovated in several ways on the software side. It was the first operating system to introduce the idea of a journalling file system, JFS, which allowed for fast boot times by avoiding the need to fsck the disks on every reboot. Another innovation was the introduction of shared libraries, which avoided the need for an application to statically link to the libraries it used. The resulting smaller binaries used less of the hardware RAM, to run, and used less of the disk space to install. Besides improving performance, it was a boon to developers: executable binaries could be in the 10s of Kbytes instead of a megabyte for an executable statically linked to the C library. AIXv3 also ditched the microkernel of AIXv2, a contentious move that resulted in v3 being somewhat more "pure" (and containing no PL/1 code) than v2. A journaling file system is a type of file system that keeps journalled metadata to avoid filesystem errors and corruption. ... JFS is a journaling filesystem created by IBM. It is available under an open source license. ... The system utility fsck (for file system check or file system consistency check) is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in the Unix system and clones thereof. ... In computer science, a library is a collection of subprograms used to develop software. ... A C library is a collection of libraries used in programming with the C programming language. ...

Other notable subsytems included:

• IrisGL, a 3D rendering library, the progenitor of OpenGL. IrisGL was licensed by IBM from SGI, then a small company which had sold only one thousand machines to date. SGI also provided the low-end graphics card for the RS/6000, capable of drawing 20,000 Gouraud-shaded triangles per second. The high-end graphics card was designed by IBM, a follow-on to the mainframe-based IBM 5080, capable of rendering 990K vectors per second.
• PHIGS, another 3D rendering API, popular in automotive CAD/CAM circles, and at the core of CATIA.
• Full support for version 11 of the X Window System, together with Motif as the recommended widget collection and window manager.
• Network file systems: NFS from Sun; AFS, the Andrew File System; and DFS, the Distributed File System.
• NCS, the Network Computing System, licensed from Apollo Computer (later purchased by HP)
• The NeXT windowing system. This was notable as a "plan B", in case the X11/Motif/IrisGL combination failed in the marketplace. In almost every way, NeXT was a better technology, and had better and more interesting features than X11/Motif. However, it was highly proprietary: it hadn't been licensed to any other Unix vendor. This, in the face of the open systems challenge of X11/Motif and its lack of 3D support, cemented its failure in the marketplace.

OpenGL official logo OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 3D computer graphics (and 2D computer graphics as well). ... Silicon Graphics, Inc. ... Gouraud shaded sphere - note the inaccuracies towards the edges of the polygons. ... PHIGS is an API standard for rendering 3D computer graphics, at one time considered to be the 3D graphics standard for the 1990s. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Motif (or capitalized MOTIF) is a graphical widget toolkit for building graphical user interfaces under the X Window System on UNIX and other POSIX-compliant systems. ... Need for Speed (NFS) is a series of video games by EA Games released on platforms including personal computers, Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation 2 consoles. ... The Andrew file system (AFS) is a distributed networked file system developed by Carnegie Mellon University as part of the Andrew Project. ... A Distributed File System (DFS) is a file system that supports sharing of files and resources in the form of persistent storage over a network. ... Network computing system. ... Apollo Computer, Inc. ... The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ... NeXT was a computer company that developed and manufactured two computer workstations during its existence, the NeXTcube and NeXTstation. ... Open systems are computer systems that provide either interoperability, portability, or freedom from proprietary standards, depending on users perspective. ...

See also

• AOS, IBM's educational-market port of 4.3BSD

Academic Operating System (AOS) was IBMs version of 4. ... Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley starting in the 1970s. ...

External links

• IBM AIX 5L
• AIX Wiki
• AIX 5L Technical Forum
• AIX & UNIX dW Zone
• AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications
• AIX fixes
• AIX/ESA V2R2 General Information