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IBM Calls Linux "Logical Successor" To AIX

Posted by timothy on from the in-line-with-recent-events dept.

pknoll writes "Though it probably won't happen soon, IBM is talking about Linux eventually replacing AIX. The article at Globe Technology states there are IBM folks working on 'chips for 2007' systems, and the viewpoint projected is described as 'multidecade,' but it's an interesting view into the future of IBM and Linux."

25 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Cheaper is better by FatSean · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If Linux support tools evolve to the level of SMIT and other such AIX things, then I can see this happening.

    --
    Blar.
    1. Re:Cheaper is better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I'm an ex-IBM employee (should have never left) and an AIX professional.

      high five, here! here!,*applause*, agreement, etc.

      having experienced many a religious war over platforms at IBM I feel confident in saying that both platforms will probably coexist on the same hardware. There will be good and bad with each OS.

      Now only if I could get the Lotus gang to hammer out a linux Notes client I could kiss the MS desktop goodbye forever.

      - Love it, be good to it, smile at it, kill it -

    2. Re:Cheaper is better by gordie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Agreed, it's my hope that like IBM's porting of their journaled file system to Linux, that they will someday do a port of SMIT to Linux. Of all the various tools supplied with all the various Unix "flavors", I've used over the years, SMIT is by far IMHO the best!

    3. Re:Cheaper is better by RFC959 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Agreed, SMIT is pretty good, but in some ways it's too good for the admins' good. What do I mean by that? I mean that because you can do almost anything through SMIT, IBM has very little incentive to make commands usable on their own. Almost every even slightly complicated AIX command ends up needing a syntax like 'command -x -T -f -q0 -R 4096 -n foo -a bar=baz'. As a result, it's hard to do much except through SMIT, because you can't remember the umpty-zillion weird options the command needs. (It doesn't help that AIX manpages tend to be about ten feet long and put the options near the end. As a sysadmin, I don't have a problem with the command line, and I'm used to options! But AIX's are just ridiculous.)

      I don't think we will ever really see SMIT for Linux like SMIT for AIX, though. IBM can make SMIT for AIX because they can control the interface for every part of AIX; they can force it to pass AIX Central Change Control or whatever it's called. They can't do that with Linux...unless it's strictly IBM Linux, and then it's not going to resemble other flavors, so what does it really buy you?

  2. Unix by Cookeisparanoid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Considering IBM were one of the companies who helped splinter Unix in the first place is it a good idea to pin the future of linux on them.
    Also dont they have a mjority stakholding in SuSE practically the only distrobution you cant download iso for?

  3. IBM has a sneaky approach... by swordboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They have their own tools but all of a sudden, Linux comes along. Because most middle-management add it to their dictionary of buzzword compliance, IBM simply replaces their existing tools with Linux. Their prices don't change and, all-of-a-sudden, IBM becomes synonymous with buzzword compliancy. And they get to milk developers who work for free!

    --

    Life is the leading cause of death in America.
  4. Re:But Smaller Is Better... by Cnik70 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I also believe that IBM is behind Linux, but not just as a server OS.

    We all know that mainframes are getting smaller and smaller, it's just a matter of a few years before they end up being the size of laptops... Linux is a very logical step for a small desktop "mainframe" and/or server. Using Linux as the OS on both would just make connectivity and streamlined installs and upgrades that much easier since all would work using the same OS.

    --
    -Cnik
  5. Re:Buy-in from customer base needed... by Atzanteol · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Performance in the data center isn't there yet for Linux. Almost nobody with a serious databasee will run it on Linux. Even though DB2 and Oracle run on Linux, it's just not as fast yet. 2.6 should hopefully change this, as the kernel developers have been taking suggestions in this area to heart.

    --
    "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

    - Charles Darwin
  6. AIX is dead by Bob+Abooey · · Score: 3, Interesting
    So is Solaris and HP-UX and IRIX, although Solaris will still be around for a while.

    Who do you think Linux has been taking market share away from? It hasn't been Windows as much as the hard core *nix's. The problem is that it doesn't pay IBM or Sun or HP to maintain their own version of *nix if they aren't able to sell enough service contracts and generate enough money to keep the OS moving forward. Thus they die and move to using Linux where they don'thave to invest as much money into research and dev because much of that is done for free.

    This is actually the rightful conclusion for *nix as all the splintering that happened is now going to un-happen and migrate to Linux.

    Makes sense to me.

    --

    All the best,
    --Bob

  7. Not quite what it seems... by joebagodonuts · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The article points out that AIX is handled by the Server group at IBM, not the software group. So while this Mills guy says exciting things, he isn't necessarily the guy to make that decision.

    --
    "Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
    1. Re:Not quite what it seems... by McSpew · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The article points out that AIX is handled by the Server group at IBM, not the software group. So while this Mills guy says exciting things, he isn't necessarily the guy to make that decision.

      Excellent point. Anybody who actually read the article (and it's been up on News.com's website for a couple of days now) knows that IBM's AIX folks are surprised to hear that AIX's days are apparently numbered.

      Basically, the article quotes one guy from IBM as saying that he foresees the day when Linux will replace AIX in IBM's lineup. The odds are that he's right simply because it costs so much to develop a Unix and keep it current, and IBM wants to be able to have you scale up from a low-end Intel box to a Z-series mainframe with any stop in between and take your software with you. Linux is the one OS that runs on all of IBM's hardware.

      But that said, it'll be awhile and the AIX guys won't go quietly. They'll probably have some kind of AIX-compatibility libraries that they'll license to their customers the way SCO is planning to do with their libraries. IBM may also port their AIX management tools to Linux and license those separately, as well. Who knows what the future will hold, but it's likely that Linux will simply absorb AIX's capabilities in IBM's product lineup at some point. This means that even if AIX goes away, it won't really go away--it'll just change shape.

      One last point. As someone pointed out in the article, "IBM has never decommissioned an operating system, and they're not about to start now."

  8. OS400 by axxackall · · Score: 2, Interesting
    What's happened to OS400?

    Will it be also forgotten?

    It has many interesting features. Will IBM port them to Linux as it did with some of AIX ones (JFS is just one example)?

    --

    Less is more !
    1. Re:OS400 by ender81b · · Score: 2, Interesting

      MY dad runs a as/400 shop and recently attended a ibm conference. One of the cool new things you can do with the latest release of os/400 is run virtual instances of Linux (SuSe, Red Hat, and one other are supported). Much like VMware or a jailed BSD partition. Specify X amount of CPU time X amount of ram/disk space, etc. It is very, very cool.

  9. porting software by PD · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work for a small company in Austin TX that ports software. We like to brag that we can port anything to anything, but in reality, all the work that I seem to be doing is porting from either Solaris or HP-UX to Linux. AIX takes a very close second to the targets that we are porting to. Of course, this is very biased, since we're an IBM business partner. :-) I'm sure there's ports going on somewhere to Solaris and HP-UX.

    In all of the arrangements that I've been involved with IBM on, their people have been completely indifferent about porting to Linux in preference to AIX. They simply don't seem to care what the hardware is running, as long as the customer is buying shiny new IBM boxes.

    Something interesting though - IBM's Visual Age for C++ compiler was a pain in the ass to figure out. There's a zillion command line switches, and getting the right ones set to build proper dynamic libraries took a bit of figuring out. gcc was much nicer in that regard. But, now that I've got them figured out, I really like IBM's compiler more than gcc 2.95. I haven't had the luck of using gcc 3.2.1 yet (third party libraries aren't typically built with it yet, and I use Debian at home) but I can't wait. That new gcc compiler will really be sweet.

    --
    If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
  10. An obvious choice, when you think about it. by DarklordJonnyDigital · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This isn't even a new thing.

    It's pretty obvious why IBM are taking a serious look at changing over to a whole new kind of *nix. Simply compare the two. Before you read this article how many of you - and honestly, now - how many of you didn't know what AIX was? At least a couple, I can be sure. On the other hand, who reading Slashdot has never heard of Linux?

    AIX is an obscure, nasty system that costs IBM money to maintain. Linux, if I remember my first foray into the operating system correctly, cost me naught but a handful of blank CDs and every other IRC monkey could give me free techsupport for it.

    I rest my proverbial case.

  11. Linux eating up its parents by bot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... is my biggest fear. I've seen so many companies move from being Solaris/HP-UX shops to Linux.

    A world in which UNIX is loses out, is a world that Microsoft would like very much. Fighting against UNIX vendors is much harder than fighting against Linux vendors, especially since the Linux companies wont have that kind of money (you can't charge for Linux boxen what you charge for a UNIX box) to fight back

    Just my two cents...

  12. Re:Why X? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    First, let me point you towards Wikipedia's history of Unix

    Also, I found this on Usenet, hopefully it will give you a good idea on the background of Unix:

    Hi,

    I can give you a brief "unofficial" history of Unix. Some may contest these statements, as is their right, but to my understanding, most of the statements below are believed to be true. I wouldn't base my paper on this, but maybe it will be enough to point you in the right direction.

    I think the story begins a AT&T Bell labs, where a bunch of scientists spent an incredibly large amount of money, time and effort in the development of an operating system called MULTIX. MULTIX was supposed to be the operating system to beat all operating systems. It was to be multi-tasking, multi-user, multi-everything. Unfortunately, in the course of its development, it grew so large and so complicated, that the "powers that were" ordained its demise. The result, it was never finished. That is not to say, however, that nothing was accomplished. Although MULTIX as an operating system was never completed, many of the tools, utilities, shells, interfaces, etc.... were. Those parts of MULTIX which were completed for eventual use in MULTIX were integrated into the development environment used by the programmers and devellopers on the project. This development environment was at that time the most advanced, most flexible, and most useable environment around. You can image the agony those scientists went through when they had to go back to the old way of doing things. So great was this agony, that a small group of scientists decided to do something about it. They decided to try to create something like MULTIX. Not the giant, undecipherable vehemoth that they had spent so many hours and dollars on, but a smaller, simpler operating system that would run on one machine ONLY. So they wrote an operating system. Someone made a joke about how it wasn't MULTIX because it didn't run on multiple platforms, and it didn't do all that MULTIX would have done, but because it only ran on one machine, they would call it UNIX (Many say this is a fictional account). They put into Unix, all of the tools, utilities, interfaces, etc that they had loved from the MULTIX development environment. They were happy. That is until the machine for which they had written their Unix was decommissioned and replaced by a newer machine. Then, horror of horrors, they realized that they were going to loose their precious Unix. Their Unix, written entirely in assembly, would have to ported to the new machine. This meant many hours of re-writing assembly code, testing, debugging, and headaches. Then they had a brainstorm that would thrust Unix into the hall of OS fame. They would write their new version of Unix in a high level programming language (they chose C) instead of assembly. This was truly revolutionary, and had vast reprocussions. By the time their first working version was produced, the new Unix was only about 10% assembly language code. This would now mean that in order to port Unix to a new platform, they no longer had to rewrite the entire thing, only the part that was specific to that particular platform. The C code could be compiled and the port would be complete. This meant that Unix was now truly portable. It was now closer to being all that MULTIX had promised than MULTIX ever got. In years to come, as Unix grew in popularity, development was split (I'm not sure how) between AT&T Bell Labs and The University of California, Berkley. At this point Unix began to become more and more diverse as two different philosophies were used to push development further. This is how we came to have all the different "flavors" of unix that we have today.

    Short, general, and subject to arguement, but I hope this helps.

    Glen.

    And finally, correct me if I am wrong, but it is assumed that Linux gets it's name because it is the brainchild of Linus Torvalds

  13. Re:Why X? by tesmako · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually you got it backwards, Multics was extremely multiuser, was the reasoning behind the name. UNIX started out as largely a singleuser simplification of Multics (which was a very complex system), first named UNICS, which makes the pun much simpler to understand. The name was changed to UNIX when multiuser support was added.

    Multics is really to operating systems what Algol was to programming languages, the huge research project where they found a lot of the do's and dont's in operating system design. A great system all in all, a bit too ahead of its time though.

    See http://www.wagoneers.com/UNIX/City-U/Multics/ for more information.

  14. Linux is what IBM really wanted... by Kjella · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IBM is doing fine selling server hardware (w/software). They never wanted to be in the OS business in the first place. First they gave the marked to Microsoft, then they figured it was a bad idea and tried to strike back with OS/2, but it didn't work out. They don't mind that they're not "in control" of Linux. They just don't want someone else to be either.

    However, now that IBM is just "one of the crowd" selling PCs, I don't think you can expect the same support when it comes to the desktop. But everything that makes a good back-end server and server tools, goes a long way to make a good desktop too.

    Kjella

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    1. Re:Linux is what IBM really wanted... by SN74S181 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      However, now that IBM is just "one of the crowd" selling PCs,


      It might surprise you to hear this, but it's gotta be said: there are lots of computers, billions of dollars worth of them, that you can't buy at Best Buy. Many of them that you can't even plug into the wall.

      And on the subject of OS/2, IBM and Microsoft wrote OS/2 as partners. Plus, part of what kept the clone vendors from adopting OS/2 is that they didn't want to have to buy an OS from one of their competitors (Microsoft is not a hardware vendor, they weren't giving $$ for each unit sold to one of their competitors in the hardware market, the way they were whenever they sold a machine bundled with OS/2).

      Your history really, really needs some work, but then so does most of the rest of what you typed.
  15. Re:That is a crying shame by pcraven · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This post says nothing. Perhaps you could list what features AIX has that Linux does not? That would be an interesting post.

    I use AIX all the time. To me it is just another UNIX system.

  16. Brilliant idea... by MamasGun · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Now only if I could get the Lotus gang to hammer out a linux Notes client I could kiss the MS desktop goodbye forever.

    Absolutely. I actually LIKE Notes. It's what LookOut should be but isn't. I use it at work. Maybe if there was a Linux client I could persuade someone to try out Linux as an alternative OS here. Then again, this is a big company and they LOVE Microsoft here.

    --
    "But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
    -- Jack Valenti
  17. Porting between Linux, AIX and Solaris. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I've done a fair amount of porting stuff to/from Linux, Solaris and AIX myself, and mostly found that a typical SolarisLinux port consists mostly of plopping the sourcecode from one machine onto the other machine and simply compiling it. Maybe changing a few small details in the makefile, but that's it. I agree with you about AIX, sometimes it is a little strange, but after you get used to the quirks and complexities of Visual Age, you see how really powerful and flexible it can be. I actually prefer to port and run stuff on AIX nowadays. Especially now that AIX 5.1L has so much Linux "affinity" built in, that porting AIXLinux both ways is almost childs play.

  18. Re:That is a crying shame by RFC959 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yeah, "little gadgets" like /usr/bin/ldd. (Yes, there are open-source versions, but it's still a nuisance.) As far as "rock solid"...while the OS seems stable enough (then again, so's just about every modern Unix) have you ever rebooted a p690 LPAR? About one time in 10, the Hardware Management Console stops the system during boot, and unless you can get to the HMC, you're fucked. Let us not speak of the idiocy of requiring Ye Magick Proprietary Console in the first place... And ask me about the time smitty dumped core on me every time I ran it. I've had enough with "enterprise" crap. To me, "enterprise" is synonymous with "overpriced, overdesigned, and requiring full-time care and feeding." Oh well...I'm just bitter because my office had a nice Sun environment, and the VP of technology decided to repay Sun for their service by moving everything to AIX, for no reason I can tell other than that he's got his tongue firmly lodged in IBM's ass...

  19. Crucial part of the article by shut_up_man · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Customers have a finite amount of money they can spend on applications, hardware, operating systems, storage and the other components of their computing infrastructure, Mr. Mills explained. "Reducing the cost of the operating system allows them to spend more money elsewhere," he said.

    I think this is the crucial part of this article, and the crucial point that most Linux-embracing companies are running with. With Microsoft, the money goes Microsoft and Intel/AMD. MS OSes only run on Intel/AMD hardware. Microsoft's apps only run on Microsoft OSes. Basically, IBM and Sun and the rest are getting bugger all money from this entire market segment, and widespread acceptence of Linux might change all that.

    If Linux gets big, these guys are back in the game, getting a slice of everyone's cash. They can sell hardware that runs Linux, and their apps can run on a platform not controlled by Microsoft. And, since Linux runs on everything from a watch to a toaster to a PC to bigass servers, their apps have the potential to be just about anywhere. That's a future IBM would love to come true.

    I've worked with a bunch of IBM and Lotus guys and gals, and daaaaammmmnnnn do they hate Microsoft. They'd put Redmond to the torch if they thought it would get them back in the game. I don't honestly think they'd smoke AIX to make Linux succeed, but they definitely see it is a brighter future.