AIX

Originally known as Advanced Interactive eXecutive, AIX is an operating system that is a derivative of UNIX and has been developed by IBM for computer equipment running on PowerPC and i86 processors, with notably strong support for security and fault tolerance. The i86 versions have been dropped and the company currently only offers the OS on PowerPC based workstations and server hardware although for a short while the Santa Cruz Operation sold a port of AIX running on Itanium hardware under the name Monterey Unix.

Currently AIX runs on hardware specifically designed by IBM to run AIX but also on System i server hardware, it can be run as a virtualised task on Z/OS mainframes and a few third party server and workstation manufacturers offer AIX compatible hardware as well. It has in fact been available as a "task" operating system on IBM 370 and all newer mainframes, much of the porting of Kyoto Common Lisp in the late 80's to AIX took place on a 370 running AIX although the ultimate target was RT PC.

AIX has carved out a niche as a high-availability alternative to popular open source UNIX clones and is particularly known for its strong disk subsystem features. It was notably the first OS to offer a journaling file system when it introduced JFS with AIX 3.1 in 1990, a mostly compatible but much improved and more portable version of the system was created for OS/2 in the latter half of the 90's and is known as JFS, that was then ported to to AIX and there called JFS2, with the older file system being renamed JFS1. For a time in the mid to late 90's lots of system and development software was either ported from AIX to OS/2, from OS/2 to AIX or developed for both systems at the same time.

AIX is also one of the few UNIX like systems that comply with the Single Unix Specification alongside Solaris and HP-UX

Versions

AIX/RT

The AIX Operating System is based on ISC's IN/ix, which is based on AT&T UNIX System V. Some portions of the modifications and enhancements were developed by IBM, others were developed by ISC under contract.

• 1986: IBM RT PC Advanced Interactive Executive Operating System (5669-061)
• 1987: AIX/RT Operating System Version 2.1
• 1988: AIX/RT Operating System Version 2.2
• 1989: AIX/RT Operating System Version 2.2.1

AIX/6000 (POWER RISC architecture)

• 1990: AIX Version 3 for RISC System/6000 (5756-030)
• 1991: AIX Version 3.1.5 for RISC System/6000
• 1992: AIX Version 3.2 for RISC System/6000
• 1992: AIX Version 3.2.1 for RISC System/6000
• 1995: AIX Version 4
• Current release: 7.2 (December 2015) - Adds live kernel replacement capability - Only works on Power 7 or higher processors.

Links & publications

• PERLZ.org - A site run by Dr. Michael Perzl that has ports for host of open source software. This is the site that used to be known as "oss4aix.org"
• AIX Kullanıcı Elkitabı - Published as HTML pages via Archive.org - 2005 - ISBN 975-96618-9-6

Short AIX tutorial in Turkish

See also

Category:AIX Tools