IBM Calls Linux "Logical Successor" To AIX

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."

Comments

Re:Buy-in from customer base needed...

[Atzanteol]

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.

porting software

[PD]

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.

Re:Why X?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Why X?

[tesmako]

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.

Re:Not quite what it seems...

[McSpew]

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."