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AIX On the Desktop Is Getting the Boot
flnca writes "Today, I was playing with the thought again to purchase an AIX workstation one day when I can afford them, and I was surprised to see that IBM is going to give its IntelliStation POWER Series workstations the boot in January '09. A black day for AIX on the desktop. I really wonder what's the problem there, warehouse costs? IBM has a history of burying its best stuff (like OS/2 for instance). Some years ago, I enjoyed hacking away on an RS/6000 workstation running AIX 4.2, and it was a pure joy. Not only the kernel, but also the admin tools, like smit and smitty. Their blade-centric solution uses Windows as a client for workstation application. This truly sounds like IBM wants AIX only for servers anymore. I'm not amused. Although, eXceed on Windows with an XDCMP server running on AIX might also be a viable solution ... whatever. But it can't beat a native POWER box sitting on your desk, that's for sure."
No, it's just you.
Q: What happens when AIX is downsized?
A: It gets the AX!
Haw haw, thank you, I'll be here all week!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seriously, how is this a story? I used AIX back in the 90s and it was okay. What do I use AIX for today? Back-end processing when I can't get a Linux box past the procurement guys.
Do I code on AIX? Nope I code on Mac OSX or Linux.
Do I manage on AIX? Nope the management stuff lives on Linux and Windows.
A story would be IBM pushing AIX on the desktop. But this is just sensible and if you really want an AIX desktop then its an X environment so just run a server and use an old box as an X Terminal.
Personally I've been looking at getting a server as my next box and concentrating on networking, monitor et al on an XTerm running a stripped down Linux. What is this 1995 to say you have to have a box running under your desk?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Who on earth would need a 5GHz CPU on the desktop?
Deleted
Get used to disappointment.
The new I7 and maybe the new 45 nm AMD cpus are probably a better solution for a workstation then a Power these days. Linux has more hardware and software support than AIX so IBM probably sees the future as an I7 running Linux.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
And you talk about smit and smitty... I guess that's the end of the conversation...
Early on, it was said that Linux would kill more Unixs than Windows ever would.
From testing OS & firmware upgrades to just being a great desktop platform, it's proven to be very valuable.
- Tony
Very informative summary, considering I was unaware IBM even offered AIX on the desktop. That alone should tell you how much they cared about it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Maybe theirs.
"I was playing with the thought again to purchase an AIX workstation one day when I can afford them..."
So you haven't bought one because it's not affordable. Yeah, I have no idea why it makes business sense for them to cut that line. I guess keeping them around to amuse you wasn't enough. Either their hardware is too expensive or their users too poor.
One things for sure - there was no profit there.
They are an IT services and consulting company.
When their mainframe division stops being the cash cow that it is, it'll go to.
Just in! "Geek wonders why product X that he loves to hack but is only used by 0.0000001% of the market is going the way of the dodo". Film at 11!
Hey, for example, I wanted Baldur's Gate 3 too :( (yes, I know that Stardock's founder wants to renew some old franchises).
sounds like IBM is trying to put their product out of the market entirely. I can run Solaris on a PC, any form of Linux, the only ones I can't are HP-UX and AIX. If that doesn't eventually make a mark in the DataCenter I don't know what will.
Not one comment? Looks like AIX on the Desktop is going out with a whimper.
Because the target market for AIX on the desktop is not people like you (namely, those who can't afford one machine, as opposed to those who regularly buy them in shipments of 1,000), I wouldn't count on IBM giving a damn whether you are amused or not by its business decision.
AIX is horrendous. I mean, truly horrible.
Smitty - though it has its uses - is the nastiest piece of manure ever to disgrace an SSH window. Everything even remotely UNXy IBM makes is, IMHO, totally over-priced.
AIX hardware is over-priced, under-powered and totally uninteresting. I have machines running Linux on Opteron right here and they simply out-perform AIX machines (including a 12 CPU Power6 P570 AIX 5.3) at least 10 times.
And don't get me started on the stability of AIX vs Linux or BSD, please. I have software here that can make any AIX machine cry and call for mommy, when most Linux distributions just suck it up and carry on.
AIX machines are essentially dull ultra-expensive big iron. Most programmers I work with would rather have a small machine with Red Hat and tons of GNU goodness on it than a huge AIX beast.
And just in case you are wondering: yes, I do administer UNIX machines for a living. Just check my Slashdot journal, and you'll get a ton of information on AIX, Solaris and so on and so forth.
This being said, I'll take AIX over Windows any day. And either Slackware or OpenBSD over everything else.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Your use of the word anymore in a non-negative construction, combined with your desire to run an AIX desktop system make me question the validity of many of your life choices and decisionmaking abilities.
Will they sell the AIX division to Lenovo just like they did with the thinkpad?
If there is any meaningful demand for the AIX desktop systems, I would think it would be worth money to someone, and hence IBM would follow their usual strategy of blundering the protift potential by selling it off to someone else to make money on it instead.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You are joking, you LIKED smit??!? We used to have bumper stickers that said "Smit Happens" on our doors where I worked a decade ago....the IBM guys REALLY hated those.
I love AIX. But really, if this is any indication of things to come - commercial Unices will be replaced by Linux in time. Not just on the de And finally, we may actually get that mythical unified Unix platform.
Am I the only one still remembering 1995, when RISC was the future and PowerPC would dominate both desktops and servers? PowerMacs, WindowNT for PowerPC and all those good stuff?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Over time, all the cool features from proprietary UNIX versions are getting ported to Linux, either directly or by being re-implemented. As Linux becomes more and more acceptable as a replacement, expect to see proprietary UNIX versions start to go away.
If IBM hires a person to work on Linux, that work helps IBM across pretty much their whole product line. If IBM hires a person to work on AIX, that work has much less value now, and will have even less and less value over time as Linux gathers up more of the market. Also, as Linux keeps getting better, it would take more and more work to add similar features to AIX, to try to keep up. Eventually, IBM is going to stop paying for work on AIX at all; they will end-of-life AIX, and just sell Linux.
I don't know for sure about SMIT but Linux does have LVM and various tools to manage it. AIX gurus, how ready is Linux to replace AIX now?
And, are desktop POWER machines going to be available with Linux?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Warehousing costs are an indicator not a base cause. If you have 1000 units sitting in a warehouse for six months depreciating, it's because no one's buying them. Which means you're losing money from a failed projection. Something this seemingly slow moving would likely need a different supply chain, say direct from manufacture, JIT. Also, the margins on such might just not be there. Hardly worth the effort since IBM is not a non-profit.
Someone hates these cans.
This is a huge blow to scientific and engineering computing. I know of thousands of POWER based Intellistations at several aerospace companies. CAD and finite element analysis software runs on these boxes, usually CATIA, NASTRAN, and some CFD codes. Engineering modeling and simulation software has been running on AIX for a while. Only now are Windows boxes near the performance that engineers need. The only good that might come of this is that hopefully the surplus market will be flooded with POWER based Intellistations and AIX CDs.
To elaborate: He's bemoaning that this beautyfull desktop is being discontinued. A true catastrophe that will set back the entire industry by years to come.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It is a pity, in emotional terms, to see interesting and unusual hardware being retired; but it really isn't a surprise, nor is there much to be done about it. Because of overwhelming economies of scale, generic x86 gear is an extraordinarily good deal in price/performance terms. In very low end(cell phones, PDAs, etc.) this doesn't hold and in some high performance or high reliability scenarios(mainframes, exotic supercomputer architectures) it is also not the case; but the desktop is, hands down, x86's area of strength. Now that multiple 64 bit processors are available in even $300 word processing boxes, and dual quad cores with 32gigs of RAM are fairly cheaply available, any task that is out of reach of commodity x86 gear isn't going to be happening on the desktop anyway.
For something like AIX, with its serious UNIX roots, most of the things you would use it for can be done remotely, from just about any client that can handle ssh and maybe NFS. There just isn't all that much point in having costly, exotic hardware sitting on your desk. Now, I'm sure that there are certain exceptions; but it is very hard to sustain a product on "certain exceptions" in a market with substantial economies of scale.
It is a pity; but neither a new nor an avoidable one, that the technology market, particularly the lower end of it, has very little room for "a bit better and a lot more expensive". If AIX ran on commodity x86 gear, even a certified subset of it, there would probably be room(just look at OpenSolaris); but as long as it depends on POWER on the desktop, it is game over.
Are you saying using smit and smitty was a pure joy?
Bwahahaha!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Seriously. The toolset sucks. None of the major FOSS projects even know or care if their projects will build on AIX anymore, including (most importantly for me) the CPAN (CPAN testers haven't tested CPAN builds on AIX for years as far as I can tell). The command line utilities have feature sets from like 1976, so you have to install a bunch of GNU packages if you want to get anything done. The best part, IBM will happily sell you a pile of AIX hardware and promise you that the millions of bucks you're getting ready to spend for software to run on it will be well-spent, then you'll find out that half the stuff has never been tested in the real world. Fact is, in the time I spent working on (struggling with?) AIX recently I saw little evidence that IBM is putting any resources into AIX.
slashdot broke my sig
YellowDog makes a PowerPC based Linux machine. The latest Linux Journal has a review of it:
http://us.fixstars.com/products/powerstation/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10263
Not perfect, but workable.
If you're just need an X server on Windows to connect to your *nix box, I suggest using Xming. It's free, lightweight, easy to configure, and one can quickly setup shortcuts to connect to a specific server and run a program. It's also very useful for getting around a content filter if you can access your own *nix server from the internet.
I don't have any affiliation with Colin Harrison, however I've used other X servers on Windows before and this has been the best. Here's my experience with different X servers:
Exceed - Bloated, expensive, extra licensing fee for doing X11 over SSH, unstable copy and paste (in the past versions I used)
ReflectionX - A bit bloated, expensive, funky interface
Cygwin* - Too many unneeded apps included for just an X server, FREE, difficult to configure if you're not familiar with it
Xming - Light weight, FREE, quick install, can use PuTTY's plink to do configure free X11 forwarding over SSH, copy and paste works, it just works
*In regards to Cygwin, I understand that it is more than just an X server, however it has been recommended a number of times to me as a solution for a free X server on Windows
Seriously, what use do you have for this unless you're working in an AIX server environment? Even then it would be of dubious value methinks. I hate to take a question and say use something else like Linux or OS X, but... yeah.
More detail perhaps on why AIX on the desktop is useful? And if there aren't many reasons, then we know why it was killed.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Today, I was playing with the thought again to purchase an AIX workstation one day when I can afford them...
Is that how you spend your time? Why don't you learn to program and get a job instead of posting your spending fantasies to Slashdot.
Someone needs to get a life.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Is AIX worth saving? My last experience of it was 12 years ago, but it was horrid. By far the worst of the Unix-like machines I have ever had to admin, and hardly Unix-like at all. It did everything different from other Unix variants. It's log files and config files were all in binary so you couldn't grep through them. Yuck.
It might have survived had the marketing department been able to come up with a better name for it in the last twenty years.
"I have AIX on my desktop!"
"Oh, I'm sorry honey. I got some aspirin in my top drawer at my desk. Help yourself."
"No, I mean it's AIX."
"You told me already. Take some aspirin and have a cup of coffee. That works for migranes too."
"Arrrrrgh!"
"Poor guy--I should talk to the boss about seeing if he can get some vacation time in soon..."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I am outraged!
(Better be careful--I might take my ball and head back to VMS...)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
You and the two other AIX-on-the-desktop people just aren't enough demand. ;-) It's a numbers game.
This was meant to be funny right?
Why bother
It's been done. Back in '83.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
In a day like this, when free linux on close to free commodity hardware can not find its way to the desktop, what would you expect. People shell out thousands of dollars to put a PowerPC on their desktop and run the most god-awful version of UNIX around ? And IBM to subsidize two masochists who enjoy torturing themselves by overspending and making life more complex for themselves by keeping a monster like this alive. Newsflash: IBM is a for profit company. Whatever shows or lacks the promise of profits will rightly find their way to the technology cemetary.
I am waiting for the day for AIX to die totally, server and desktop combined. But with stupid c-level executives keeping the notion of "nobody got fired buying IBM" I believe AIX will outlast my lifetime then some.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
I've had to maintain an AIX/Risc box for about a decade and one thing it is, is very very stable.
But last year IBM changed their model for providing updates to AIX. Previously, I was able to make one time purchases to upgrade from say 4.0 to 4.2. But now IBM demands you buy a reoccurring subscription to receive any future updates to AIX.
They state I get customer support with this subscription, but in the previous ten years I maintained this box, I never needed IBM support.
After they told me the subscription was mandatory to receive any future AIX update, I told them to take a hike.
Now we run only linux/windows.
Thanks for ruining a good thing, IBM!
THe IBM HC10 manages to be expensive, slow, and unreliable. Just check the benchmarks!
AG
AIX - Ain't Unix anyway ;-)
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Last night, I was working with an old sys admin and he loves AIX for backend work, and feels that linux has too much a "collegiate feel" to it.
He mentioned that any "experienced" AIX folks would know what this is: "When in trouble scream and shout, wave your arms and run about".
Apparently it's a "hangs on boot", "error" message.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
Seriously, that looks worse than GeoWorks!
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
YellowDog is in the Linux Distro business, not HW.
It looks like Fixstar is selling rebranded low-end Intellistations. Not a Linux-box per se. You could likely run AIX on it if you like.
I'd like to run MacOS 8 on it, myself..
It is a very nice OS, its graphical interface is based also in X and runs in fast commodity hardware.....
Check itÂout!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
its best stuff (like OS/2 for instance)
excuse me?
Of course! ;)
...and they don't want the G5 back. IBM is behind the curve on taking a POWER-based architecture off the desktop.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Well, there are people who get pleasure out of being beaten and whipped, so I guess it figures that someone might actually like AIX. I used to work with it on a former job and let me tell you it was one happy day for me when we stopped using AIX and starting using Solaris and Linux instead. AIX isn't the worst Unix-like OS I've ever seen, but it's certainly nothing great either. It's best feature, LVM, is now in Linux anyway. I can honestly say that when looking for jobs I have shied away from AIX shops as I just don't want to do that kind of work anymore unless I don't have a choice. AIX skills really aren't applicable on other OSes, so that job ended up with a bunch of competent AIX admins who were useless on other platforms as they never worked with anything else.
I have an RS/6000 F50 sitting at home. Want it?
18 drive RAID array. 130GB total!
2 603e PPC Processors!
I don't turn it on anymore because it sucks up a lot of energy and makes a lot of noise.
Careful, thats a subscriber you are talking to. Note the asterisk.
HAND
music lover since 1969
IBM has a pretty decent-sized Linux operation. Odds are the AIX workstations are being ditched as redundant and non-competitive (price-wise) with Linux-based stations. Is there really any workstation software that is available on AIX that isn't available on Linux?
We are the 198 proof..
In late 2000, there were rumblings of getting rid of the desktop RS/6Ks.
In 2003, the rush was to grab any chip design tool that ran on Linux instead of AIX because an extra PC intended to be used by an administrative assistant could run the chip simulations and layout faster than any pSeries hardware we could afford in the budget.
It's now 2008, corporate policy now dictates that if it even remotely resembles a remotely accessible server it shall be locked up in a controlled area. We could kludge together network KVMs to a pile of AIX desktops in the server room, or we can yank the video card from a 550 and replace it with a fibre channel adapter and break it into several LPARs for the developers and tell them "Have fun using ssh!"
I enjoyed having an AIX box as a primary or secondary workstation for about 8 years. I enjoyed a few periods where the video adapter in my AIX box blew away anything readily available for the PC. But now that it's 2008, the AIX box at my desk is reached via ssh. The last time I had to reinstall it, the reinstall was done from within minicom. The graphical programs I use run on the corporate approved Linux desktop, not on AIX.
Then there's the minor matter that linux KVM for PPC turns non-lparable Power hardware into a direct competitor for the lparable hardware...
OK, Unix on the desktop (i.e Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, AIX, etc.) is dead. OpenSolaris may live, but only through (a) being open source and (b) running on commodity hardware. MacOS will survive through (a) being Mac, and (b) running on commodity hardware. However, the days of non-x86 desktops are over.
A desktop is about one thing: The "user experience." That has always been a matter of performance and interface. Now that a small and cheap computer is eminently capable of most workstation tasks (audio, video, graphics, modelling, etc.) the need to spend $25k on a workstation is eliminated. It doesn't matter if a Power system or a SPARC is faster than an x86 (and on the desktop end, that's rarely the case), because the x86 is fast _enough_. At that point, the software developers will write desktop apps for Linux or Windows, and the software-driven need for workstations is eliminated.
The writing for workstations has been on the wall for _ages_. Sun is getting out of low-end SPARC systems as well--the official announcement will probably be within a year. HP got rid of their HP-UX workstations a while ago, and they want to eliminate HP-UX from their vocabulary entirely.
Before long, if it ain't a server, it'll be x86 running a 'consumer' OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS, OpenSolaris). The corner cases are almost all gone now.
(disclaimer: I'm writing this on a Sun Ultra40 workstation. Ironic much?)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Due to the size of our world, I'm afraid the answer to your question is probably "yes". I'm thinking specifically of their OSL. Which (last I checked) was also abandoned; their recommendation was to use COIN-OR. Not that I think COIN-OR is inferior, but porting thousands of lines of CASE generated code does not sound like fun to me!
I think it's amazing power workstations lasted as long as they did. SGI quit the biz years ago, DEC is lost in the annuls of history, sun sells workstations, but they are just PCs. The workstation market is gone, history, no more. It's been almost 10 years that an intel/linux box with a good gamer graphics card has been outrunning dedicated workstations costing ten times as much.
Not only they fragmented and nearly killed this platfom! Now they are ditching their proprietary unices in favor of what? Windows! At the same time when Windows is clearly in crisis, no innovations, slow development, bloat, nobody wants new version anymore, etc. WTF???
Sure, the POWER CPUs in general (and most notably POWER5 and POWER6) are very powerful. Even AIX is a pretty decent UNIX. As mentioned, smit[ty] is a very good tool to perform admin tasks. I just never thought AIX was particularly great on the desktop. I mean, I love CDE and I've always enjoyed using it for the simplicity and clean look (side note: what ever happened to being able to buy CDE for Linux?), but I/O (and namely filesystem I/O) on AIX is for the birds. JFS and JFS2 are very robust filesystems, but for anything approaching real speed, they just don't get it done.
I have several of the 285 workstations here, and I replaced mine with a Linux desktop months ago. The rest of the guys in my group followed suit shortly after I showed them they could accomplish pretty much the same tasks. If IBM used a half decent video card in the workstations, loading Linux on them would be the ideal solution. However, they are like 4MB PCI cards or something silly, and the amount of colors you can get is laughable.
I dunno. I can kind of see the point of lamenting that IBM has decided to nix AIX as a workstation, but honestly, it's been in decline for a long time.
...and there really is no more practical real need anymore for an individual AIX desktop workstation. Today's RS6000 boxen support LPARs, so you all you need to do if you want a "desktop" personal AIX instance, is to create yourself a private LPAR on the server. Then you basically have a virtualized machine all to yourself for testing and development.
*My* desktop computer is a Gnip-Gnop running a version of Fujitsu TOWNS OS implemented as an ELisp extension under GNU/EMACS.
I win.
IBM has a history of burying its best stuff...
Desktop AIX is not even remotely close to IBMs best stuff. AIX is designed for the enterprise computing market, NOT desktop computers. There are many companies out there that are willing to spend MILLIONS of dollars on high end machines (think hundreds of cores and terrabytes of RAM). These are companies like AT&T, NSA, FBI, NYSE, etc. Why on earth would IBM care about missing a few pennies on a desktop AIX box when they're making billions on large servers?
The case is cool. Is there any place where they sell it, without all the stuff inside? :-)
Please can we let the "Bill never said that" troll die ?
Yes, there are quote of him telling that he didn't utter these precise words. :
On the other hand
I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. {...} that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't
and :
I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that.
{...} It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications withinâ"oh five or six years people were complaining.
He didn't say the precise words. On the other hand he admitted having a hand in the design and thus he is the short-sighted we have to blame for not taking enough headroom for letting further evolution, at a time when contemporary processors like the 68k, where making special provisions for future 32bits computing.
You're asked to help design the OS and the memory layout for a machine made by the maker of most big iron machines of that time (IBM !). This machine is probably going to stay around for a lot of time (again it's an IBM - not an obscure asian maker who might not be still in business). It will probably stay mainly in the business sector, where customer have money to throw at memory upgrades (ok, he got lucky with that : the machine enjoyed lot of popularity in small business and homes which are much more financially limited and won't necessarily throw that much money at it).
And what do you do ? You split the memory in a way which will limit further evolution. Just when computers are switching from 8bit to 16bit because the memory was too much cramped, you make a design which will create problems down the line again, too.
He could have laid the reserved memory in the beginning thus not putting any top limit to the memory.
He could have let the position of reserved memory open, (with an interrupt telling where the actual reserved memory lies) and thus letting machine use different memory layout as needs for memory increase.
Well, he was short-sighted, he made bad decisions and in consequence of these, programming on ms-dos has been a world of pain for several years.
Therefor he deserves to be ridiculed about the 640k limit. Even if he never said it literally.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
UNIX is as UNIX does. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you might as well call it a duck... and OS X and Linux and BSD are all UNIX for any practical purposes.
> IBM has a history of burying its best stuff (like OS/2 for instance).
Ah ... um, Hrulllpghhh!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
I have used RS/6000's too, and I can say that the machine, along with the OS, along with smit and smitty *aren't* pretty (pun). The OS was unreliable during my time with it. Random locks, faults and many programs didn't work. Not to mention the difficulty you have when trying to set up custom software.
http://www.sun.com/desktop/ Note, no high end Sparc workstations. No fanfare or trumpets. Just gone. One day you could order them, the next you couldn't. It made me sad as my manager was thinking about kitting us developers out with some monster workstations for development.
A black day for AIX on the desktop.
There's no verb in this sentence.
Want to know why you don't get cool UNIX workstations anymore? LINUX!
Because a cheap beige box mutt PC and Linux are so cheap nobody wants to spend the money for the high quality workstations anymore.
RIP
Silicon Graphics Workstations (and IRIX)
RS/6000 Workstations
HP Workstations
Sun Workstations (they are all PC's now)
Thanks Linux! Now everybody can have a cheap piece of crap under their desks!
Er, no.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
maybe we can finally go back to AOS!
I'm in a shop where the customer is migrating from five year old AIX servers to brand new Red Hat. They're going from 20 servers to 200 to do the same units of work. Of course now there is more images and more patching. The customer is upset at all the down time, and we are frustrated because of all the vulerabilities that come up in Red Hat.. I mean, really, why is bluetooth support installed by default. There are just so many useless things in Linux that get intalled by default that constantly require patching. In any environment I've worked in, every fix must be made and documented and it's just so much trouble to keep on top of these little fixes. When I installed AIX by default I got core AIX. When I install Red Hat I get drivers for everything under the sun, libraries for everything under the sun.. It's a mess to patch.
I used to be able to have the comfort of being able to roll back individual packages but Linux has no solution for this. If anything bad happens in an update it's a complete rebuild.
Don't even get me started on Linux LVM for enterprise use. ext3-based LVM is so slow and quirky that we had to go native. But of course we've lost all flexibility... It's going to be a mess.
My first thought on seeing A|X was that this article was about sitting back in your chair and putting your Armani Exchange boots on the desktop.
Even Deutsche Bank uses it and the germans are known to be clever, except for that one "little" mistake they made 50 years ago!
In its current form, you can virtualize a single CPU into 100 logical units for use in a LPAR. Idle CPU time is donated to a shared CPU pool, and can be acquired depending on a weighting / entitlement.
Hell, it can even fail over to another separate h/w environment without any downtime (live partition mobility). There's a reason why it sucks on the desktop. It is not some "pissy-willy-seen-UNIX-once-only-know-smitty-command" workstation solution, it is a high end server solution.
One day far far away, Linux will maybe play in this league but for now, only HP and Solaris come anywhere close.
It was a hardware limitation, you ignorant tool.
Sorry to disappoint you : I'm not a tool.
In fact, I happen to have quite some experience programming assembler for x86.
There's no such thing as a 640Ko hardware limitation. That number is completely arbitrary. Pulled out of Bill Gates' ass.
The 8088 and 8086 chip have 20 address lines. Meaning : 2^20 addressable byte or 1 MiB memory limit. The limit is there at 1 MiB.
When designing the memory layout, they had to reserve some address range to be used for stuff other than memory (BIOS, address range used by hardware, etc.)
You have a couple of actual limits imposed by the 8088/8086 chips :
- Memory is up to 1MiB
- As small portion at the begin of the memory is used for the interrupt table.
- The last bytes before the 1MiB are where the processor starts when turned on and contain instruction to jump to the BIOS it self.
These are the only fixed addresses
The split between physical memory and mapped address space could be placed anywhere.
640k was just chosen because :
- it's ten time the 64k addressable by previous machines
- it's the first segment beginning with a letter in hexadecimal. memory is in segments 0000 to 9000, reserved are in segments A000 (color graphics) to F000 (BIOS)
If the addresses hadn't been fixed in advance and/or the reserved space had been place in the begin of the address space like on most home microcomputers, the address space left for memory would have been continuous. Yielding to more free addresse for more "main memory" (the upper 384 are a huge waste of space - as proof see all the TSR programs that existed to try to "loadhi" and cram more software in that "UMB" memory range). A continuous memory scheme would probably have helped a more easy transition scheme to processors with bigger address space.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Sun is getting out of low-end SPARC systems as well--the official announcement will probably be within a year.
Sun quietly stopped selling Sparc workstations a few months ago. Not too unexpected as they dropped the US-IIIi+ and the Niagara based systems have lame single thread performance. On the other hand, the latest 4 core Sparc64 in the M3000 system would make for a nice workstation processor.
Bit of a pity as dealing with OBP is a lot nicer than most of the BIOS's on PeeCee's.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
LOL thanks! :)
This is Slashdot. Should talk about how IBM is withdrawing Linux on POWER from the desktop.
AFAIK it is because they have decided several years ago that Linux is the way forward. You get a CD with Linux tools with every version of AIX since 4.x; there is a Linux port for mainframes, both running in an LPAR and under VM - there's even a "Linux only processor" for the newer mainframes. POWER Linux is officially sponsored and maintained by IBM; where would you fit a desktop AIX in?
AIX is not dead and probably won't die for a long time to come. AIX is very good, it's just that Linux is more than adequate for the desktop.
Last month I mailed to IBM pServer support regarding availability of IntelliStations running AIX 6.1. Since we do only application testing we didn't need a server class machine. Never received a reply. I suspected that this was going to happen. HP did this long back to HP-UX.
I cannot understand though since with AIX 6.1 they seemed to be making a plunge towards desktop segment. They were supporting a full-blown version of GNOME with Firefox instead of the crappy CDE. There were many other promising user-friendly features. AIX isn't for home users but a workstation class machine running AIX can be invaluable to an administrator managing large Unix environments.
[quote] IBM has a history of burying its best stuff (like OS/2 for instance). [/quote[ OS/2 was it's "best stuff"? That's a sad commentary about IBM. OS/2 was an operating system for a processor that was replaced before the OS was done (the 286, which could switch INTO Extended Mode from REAL Mode, but not back out of it). When the 386 came along, they released it just to say they finished it... Sort of reminiscent of Microchannel... a solution without a problem, or at least they never developed the solution far enough for it to address a real problem...
Smit happens.
Can't see if this is mentioned anywhere, but IBM got out of the desktop business a few years ago if you recall. ThinkPads are made by Lenovo now, who are a completely different company, based in China.
In addition, yes, AIX is moribund. IBM have abandoned that for z/OS on mainframes and SUSE everywhere else. I worked on a migration to an IBM datacentre a few years ago where, despite the original intention of virtualising SUSE on a z-Series mainframe, we ended with a bunch of p-Series servers running AIX. IBM couldn't even schedule a permanent member of staff to build the machines and had to get a contractor in to install their own OS on their own machines.
Having said that, I knew someone at the time who had a PowerPC ThinkPad, which was a peculiar beast indeed. It ran AIX with CDE but even in 2004 it seemed like an anachronism with very few of the things you needed to make a desktop machine useful: I think OpenOffice 1 had been ported.
You will be able to get a Power 520 in tower format, look at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/520/configs/8203e4a1a.html
This looks like you could put it on your desk if you wanted, but you certainly could put it under your desk, so it's going to be a similar experience to "desktop AIX". We got one in this week for $5k where I work - not cheap but not mainframe prices.
However, unfortunately, the noise these things make is unforgivable, so you'd be best off getting the rack-mount version, putting it in the machine room and accessing it remotely, unless you absolutely need AIX with fast local graphics.
At startup it makes a noise like a jet engine during landing, and then when it settles down it makes a noise that is audible and annoying half a floor away. The thing is packed with small high-speed fans.
Kind of makes me appreciate my Sun Blade 1000. It's not a fast machine of course, but it also has a hot cpu inside and yet is so quiet people walking by my desk don't realise it's on and fiddle with the power switch (it is on top of a pedestal/shelf unit next to my desk).
Presumably the POWER6 inside the POWER 520 EXPRESS machine is not just hot but ludicrously hot.
So, no chance this is the year of AIX on the desktop? Crap!
-- dnl
Agreed. If Sun had the option of OBP on x86, I wouldn't care so much about the processor, but they haven't done it. (They could, with openfirmware--they just haven't).
The thing is, this is the beginning of the end of Sparc-based computers. If my desktop doesn't run on a Sparc, then I can't compile for our servers. Besides, enterprise capabilities are becoming unimportant on computers, thanks to paranoid and mostly stupid bureaucrats. ("I don't care if it has three power supplies and only needs two, you can't replace one without shutting down the server--the risk is too great! Damn it, I'm getting rid of these things and replacing them with appliances!")
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Apple had it's own flirtation with AIX way back in the old pre OSX days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Network_Server in those machines known as the Apple Network Server. There were folks who got them to run Yellow Dog Linux, but I recall that as being a real project to do. They were the last non-Macintosh computers to be made.
At one time, there was an AIX version that ran on Intel chips. I don't want the IBM hardware but I would love to have AIX running on x86. Right now we keep two IBM pSeries boxes up and running for business and accounting history, having moved our primary business applications over to Windows (a corporate decision, not a technical decision). If AIX ran on x86 I could ditch my IBM hardware and run our processes in a VMware virtual machine. That would be sweet.