AIX (pronounced ) is a series of proprietary

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s developed and sold by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

since 1986. The name stands for "Advanced Interactive eXecutive". Current versions are designed to work with

Power ISA Power ISA is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) currently developed by the OpenPOWER Foundation, led by IBM. It was originally developed by IBM and the now-defunct Power.org industry group. Power IS ...

based server and

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

computers such as IBM's Power line.

Background

Originally released for the IBM RT PC

RISC In electronics and computer science, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a comp ...

in 1986, AIX has supported a wide range of hardware platforms, including the IBM RS/6000 series and later Power and

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

-based systems, IBM System i, System/370 mainframes, PS/2 personal computers, and the Apple Network Server. Currently, it is supported on IBM Power Systems alongside

IBM i IBM i (the ''i'' standing for ''integrated'') is an operating system developed by IBM for IBM Power Systems. It was originally released in 1988 as OS/400, as the sole operating system of the IBM AS/400 line of systems. It was renamed to i5/OS in 2 ...

and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. AIX is based on

UNIX System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

with 4.3BSD-compatible extensions. It is certified to the UNIX 03 and UNIX V7 specifications of the

Single UNIX Specification The Single UNIX Specification (SUS) is a standard for computer operating systems, compliance with which is required to qualify for using the "UNIX" trademark. The standard specifies programming interfaces for the C language, a command-line shell, ...

, beginning with AIX versions 5.3 and 7.2 TL5, respectively. Older versions were certified to the UNIX 95 and UNIX 98 specifications. AIX was the first operating system to implement a

journaling file system A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of changes not yet committed to the file system's main part by recording the goal of such changes in a data structure known as a " journal", which is usually a circular log. In the ev ...

. IBM has continuously enhanced the software with features such as processor, disk, and network

virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

, dynamic hardware resource allocation (including fractional processor units), and

reliability engineering Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes the ability of equipment to function without failure. Reliability is defined as the probability that a product, system, or service will perform its intended functi ...

concepts derived from its

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

designs.

History

Unix began in the early 1970s at

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

research center, running on DEC

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...

s. By 1976, the operating system was used in various academic institutions, including

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, where Tom Lyon and others ported it to the S/370 to run as a guest OS under VM/370. This port became Amdahl UTS from IBM's mainframe rival, which that company increasingly proritized from the late 1980s. IBM's involvement with Unix began in 1979 when it assisted Bell Labs in porting Unix to the S/370 platform to be used as a build host for the 5ESS switch's software. During this process, IBM made modifications to the TSS/370 Resident Supervisor to better support Unix. In 1984, IBM introduced its own Unix variant for the S/370 platform called VM/IX, developed by

Interactive Systems Corporation Interactive Systems Corporation (styled INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, abbreviated ISC) was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the Unix operating system outside AT&T, operating from Santa Monica, California. It was founded in 1 ...

(ISC) using Unix System III. However, VM/IX was only available as a PRPQ (Programming Request for Price Quotation) and was not a General Availability product. By 1985 most computer companies offered Unix alongside their proprietary operating systems. Although an industry analyst that year described the company as not enthusiastic about Unix, IBM replaced VM/IX in 1985 with IBM IX/370, a fully supported product based on AT&T's Unix System V, intended to compete against UTS and also developed by ISC. ISC also developed AIX for the IBM RT PC workstation, introduced in January 1986, based on

Releases 1 and 2, and incorporating source code from 4.2 and 4.3

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

UNIX. AIX Version 2 followed in 1987 for the RT PC. In 1990, AIX Version 3 was released for the POWER-based RS/6000 platform. It became the primary operating system for the RS/6000 series, which was later renamed '' IBM eServer pSeries'', ''

IBM System p The IBM System p is a high-end line of RISC ( Power)/UNIX-based servers. It was the successor of the RS/6000 line, and predecessor of the IBM Power Systems server series. History The previous RS/6000 line was originally a line of workstations ...

'', and finally '' IBM Power Systems''. AIX Version 4, introduced in 1994, added

symmetric multiprocessing Symmetric multiprocessing or shared-memory multiprocessing (SMP) involves a multiprocessor computer hardware and software architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single, shared main memory, have full access to all ...

and evolved through the 1990s, culminating with AIX 4.3.3 in 1999. A modified version of Version 4.1 was also used as the standard OS for the Apple Network Server line by

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

. In the late 1990s, under Project Monterey, IBM and the

Santa Cruz Operation The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (usually known as SCO, pronounced either as individual letters or as a word) was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants ...

attempted to integrate AIX and UnixWare into a multiplatform Unix for

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

IA-64 IA-64 (Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the discontinued Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented by ...

architecture. The project was discontinued in 2002 after limited commercial success. In 2003, the

SCO Group The SCO Group (often referred to SCO and later called The TSG Group) was an American software company in existence from 2002 to 2012 that became known for owning Unix operating system assets that had belonged to the Santa Cruz Operation (the or ...

filed a lawsuit against IBM, alleging misappropriation of

source code in AIX. The case was resolved in 2010 when a jury ruled that

Novell Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...

owned the rights to Unix, not SCO. AIX logo old

AIX 6 was announced in May 2007 and became generally available on November 9, 2007. Key features included

role-based access control In computer systems security, role-based access control (RBAC) or role-based security is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users, and to implementing mandatory access control (MAC) or discretionary access control, discretion ...

, workload partitions, and

Live Partition Mobility Live Partition Mobility is a chargeable Live migration feature of IBM POWER6, POWER7, POWER8 and POWER9 servers, available since 2007, that allows a running LPAR to be relocated from one system to another. In concept, it is similar to VMwar ...

. AIX 7.1 was released in September 2010 with enhancements such as Cluster Aware AIX and support for large-scale memory and real-time application requirements.

Supported hardware platforms

IBM RT PC

The original AIX (sometimes called AIX/RT) was developed for the IBM RT PC workstation by IBM in conjunction with ISC, which had previously ported UNIX System III to the

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the List of IBM Personal Computer models, IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible ''de facto'' standard. Released on ...

for IBM as PC/IX. According to its developers, the original AIX source consists of one million lines of code. Installation media consists of eight 1.2M floppy disks. The RT was based on the IBM ROMP

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...

, the first commercial

chip, based on

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American Multinational corporation, multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York ...

IBM 801 The 801 was an experimental central processing unit (CPU) design developed by IBM during the 1970s. It is considered to be the first modern RISC design, relying on processor registers for all computations and eliminating the many variant addressi ...

). One of the novel aspects of the RT design is the use of a

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

, called Virtual Resource Manager (VRM). The keyboard, mouse, display, disk drives and network are all controlled by a microkernel. One can "hotkey" from one operating system to the next using the Alt-Tab key combination. Each OS in turn gets possession of the keyboard, mouse and display. Besides AIX v2, the PICK OS also includes this microkernel. Much of the AIX v2 kernel was written in the PL.8 programming language, which proved troublesome during the migration to AIX v3. AIX v2 includes full

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

networking, as well as SNA and two networking file systems: NFS, licensed from

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

, and Distributed Services (DS). DS has the distinction of being built on top of SNA, and thereby being fully compatible with DS on and on midrange systems running OS/400 through

. For the graphical user interfaces, AIX v2 comes with the X10R3 and later the X10R4 and X11 versions of the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

from MIT, with the Athena widget set. Compilers for Fortran and C were available.

IBM PS/2 series

AIX PS/2 (also known as AIX/386) was developed by

Locus Computing Corporation Locus Computing Corporation was formed in 1982 by Gerald J. Popek, Charles S. Kline and Gregory I. Thiel to commercialize the technologies developed for the LOCUS (operating system), LOCUS distributed computing, distributed operating system at UCL ...

under contract to IBM. AIX PS/2, first released in October 1988, runs on

IBM PS/2 The Personal System/2 or PS/2 is IBM's second generation of personal computers. Released in 1987, it officially replaced the IBM Personal Computer, IBM PC, IBM Personal Computer XT, XT, IBM Personal Computer/AT, AT, and IBM PC Convertible, PC Co ...

personal computers with

Intel 386 The Intel 386, originally released as the 80386 and later renamed i386, is the third-generation x86 architecture microprocessor from Intel. It was the first 32-bit processor in the line, making it a significant evolution in the x86 architect ...

and compatible processors. The product was announced in September 1988 with a baseline tag price of $595, although some utilities, such as

UUCP UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a suite of computer programs and communications protocol, protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of computer file, files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the prog ...

, were included in a separate Extension package priced at $250. nroff and

troff troff (), short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff (software), roff. Whil ...

for AIX were also sold separately in a Text Formatting System package priced at $200. The

stack for AIX PS/2 retailed for another $300. The

package was priced at $195, and has a graphical environment called the AIXwindows Desktop, based on IXI's X.desktop. The C and FORTRAN compilers each had a price tag of $275. Locus also made available their DOS Merge virtual machine environment for AIX, which can run MS DOS 3.3 applications inside AIX; DOS Merge was sold separately for another $250. IBM also offered a $150 AIX PS/2 DOS Server Program, which provided

file server In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by workstations within a co ...

and

print server In computer networking, a print server, or printer server, is a type of server that connects printers to client computers over a network. It accepts print jobs from the computers and sends the jobs to the appropriate printers, queuing the jobs ...

services for client computers running PC DOS 3.3. The last version of PS/2 AIX is 1.3. It was released in 1992 and announced to add support for non-IBM (non-microchannel) computers as well. Support for PS/2 AIX ended in March 1995.

IBM mainframes

In 1988, IBM announced AIX/370, also developed by Locus. AIX/370 was IBM's fourth attempt to offer

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

functionality for their mainframe line, specifically the System/370 (the prior versions were a TSS/370-based Unix system developed jointly with AT&T c.1980, a VM/370-based system named VM/IX developed jointly with ISC c.1984, and a VM/370-based version of TSS/370 named IX/370 which was upgraded to be compatible with

). 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 IBM Enterprise Systems Architecture is an instruction set architecture introduced by IBM as Enterprise Systems Architecture/370 (ESA/370) in 1988. It is based on the IBM System/370-XA architecture. It extended the dual-address-space mechanis ...

architecture, AIX/370 was replaced by AIX/ESA in 1991 based on OSF/1, and also runs on the System/390 platform. Unlike AIX/370, AIX/ESA runs both natively as the host operating system, and as a guest under VM. AIX/ESA, while technically advanced, had little commercial success, partially because UNIX functionality was added as an option to the existing mainframe operating system, MVS, as MVS/ESA SP Version 4 Release 3 OpenEdition in 1994, and continued as an integral part of MVS/ESA SP Version 5, OS/390 and z/OS, with the name eventually changing from ''OpenEdition'' to ''Unix System Services''. IBM also provided OpenEdition in VM/ESA Version 2 through z/VM.

IA-64 systems

As part of Project Monterey, IBM released a beta test version of AIX 5L for the IA-64 (

Itanium Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...

) architecture in 2001, but this never became an official product due to lack of interest.

Apple Network Servers

The Apple Network Server (ANS) systems are PowerPC-based systems designed by

to have numerous high-end features that contemporary standard Apple hardware does not have, including swappable hard drives, redundant power supplies, and external monitoring capability. These systems are more or less based on the

Power Macintosh The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Inc., Apple Computer, Inc as the core of the Mac (computer), Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by ''Mac ...

hardware available at the time but designed to use AIX (versions 4.1.4 or 4.1.5) as their native operating system in a specialized version specific to the ANS called AIX for Apple Network Servers. AIX is only compatible with the Network Servers and was not ported to standard Power Macintosh hardware. It should not be confused with

A/UX A/UX is a Unix-based operating system from Apple Computer for Macintosh computers, integrated with System 7's graphical interface and application compatibility. It is Apple's first official Unix-based operating system, launched in 1988 and disc ...

, Apple's earlier version of Unix for 68k-based Macintoshes.

POWER ISA/PowerPC/Power ISA-based systems

The release of AIX version 3 (sometimes called AIX/6000) coincided with the announcement of the first POWER1-based IBM RS/6000 models in 1990. AIX v3 innovated in several ways on the software side. It is the first operating system to introduce the idea of a

, JFS, which allows for fast boot times by avoiding the need to ensure the consistency of the file systems on disks (see

fsck The system utility fsck (''file system check'') is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the L ...

) on every reboot. Another innovation is shared libraries which avoid the need for static linking from an application to the libraries it used. The resulting smaller binaries use less of the hardware RAM to run, and used less disk space to install. Besides improving performance, executable binaries can be in the tens of

kilobyte The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for Computer data storage, digital information. The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix ''kilo-, kilo'' as a multiplication factor of 1000 (103); therefore, one kilobyte is 1000&nbs ...

s instead of a megabyte for an executable statically linked to the C library. AIX v3 also scrapped the microkernel of AIX v2, a contentious move that resulted in v3 containing no PL.8 code and being somewhat more "pure" than v2. Other notable subsystems include: * IRIS GL, a 3D rendering library, the progenitor of

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

. IRIS GL was licensed by IBM from SGI in 1987, a small company, which had sold only a few thousand machines at the time. 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-attached IBM 5080, capable of rendering 990,000 vectors per second. * PHIGS, another 3D rendering API, popular in automotive CAD/CAM circles, and at the core of CATIA. * Full implementation of version 11 of the X Window System, together with Motif as the recommended widget toolkit and window manager. * Network file systems: NFS from

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

; AFS, the

Andrew File System The Andrew File System (AFS) is a distributed file system which uses a set of trusted servers to present a homogeneous, location-transparent file name space to all the client workstations. It was developed by Carnegie Mellon University as part of ...

; and DFS, the

Distributed File System A clustered file system (CFS) is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously Mount (computing), mounted on multiple Server (computing), servers. There are several approaches to computer cluster, clustering, most of which do not emplo ...

. * NCS, the Network Computing System, licensed from Apollo Computer (later acquired by HP). * DPS on-screen display system as an alternative if the X11+Motif combination failed in the marketplace. However, it is highly proprietary, supported only by Sun,

NeXT NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc.) was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California that specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business markets, and later develope ...

, and IBM. This, and lack of 3D capability, caused it to fail in the marketplace versus X11+Motif and its lack of 3D capability. In addition, AIX applications can run in the PASE subsystem under

Source code

IBM made the AIX for RS/6000 source code available to customers for a fee; in 1991, IBM customers could order the AIX 3.0 source code for a one-time charge of US$60,000; subsequently, IBM released the AIX 3.1 source code in 1992, and AIX 3.2 in 1993. These source code distributions exclude certain files (authored by third-parties) which IBM did not have rights to redistribute, and also exclude layered products such as the MS-DOS emulator and the C compiler. To license the AIX source code the customer first had to procure source code license agreements with AT&T and the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

Versions

POWER/PowerPC/Power ISA releases

* AIX V7.3, December 10, 2021 ** Requires

POWER8 POWER8 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA, announced in August 2013 at the Hot Chips conference. The designs are available for licensing under the OpenPOWER Foundation, which is the first time for suc ...

or newer CPUs * AIX V7.2, October 5, 2015 ** Live update for Interim Fixes, Service Packs and Technology Levels replaces the entire AIX kernel without impacting applications ** Flash based filesystem caching ** Cluster Aware AIX automation with repository replacement mechanism ** SRIOV-backed VNIC, or dedicated VNIC virtualized network adapter support ** RDSv3 over RoCE adds support of the Oracle RDSv3 protocol over the Mellanox Connect RoCE adapters ** Supports secure boot on POWER9 systems. ** Requires POWER7 or newer CPUs * AIX V7.1, September 10, 2010 ** Support for 256 cores / 1024 threads in a single LPAR ** The ability to run AIX V5.2 or V5.3 inside of a Workload Partition ** An XML profile based system configuration management utility ** Support for export of Fibre Channel adapters to WPARs ** VIOS disk support in a WPAR ** Cluster Aware AIX ** AIX Event infrastructure ** Role-based access control (RBAC) with domain support for multi-tenant environments ** Requires

POWER4 The POWER4 is a microprocessor developed by IBM, International Business Machines (IBM) that implemented the 64-bit PowerPC and PowerPC AS instruction set architectures. Released in 2001, the POWER4 succeeded the POWER3 and RS64 microprocessors, e ...

or newer CPUs * AIX V6.1, November 9, 2007 ** Workload Partitions (WPARs)

operating system-level virtualization OS-level virtualization is an operating system (OS) virtualization paradigm in which the Kernel (operating system), kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated user space and kernel space, user space instances, including containers (LXC, Sol ...

** Live Application Mobility **

** Security *** Role Based Access Control

RBAC In computer systems security, role-based access control (RBAC) or role-based security is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users, and to implementing mandatory access control (MAC) or discretionary access control (DAC). Ro ...

*** AIX Security Expert a system and network security hardening tool *** Encrypting JFS2 filesystem *** Trusted AIX *** Trusted Execution ** Integrated Electronic Service Agent for auto error reporting ** Concurrent Kernel Maintenance ** Kernel exploitation of

POWER6 The POWER6 is a microprocessor developed by IBM that implemented the Power ISA#Power ISA v.2.05, Power ISA v.2.05. When it became available in systems in 2007, it succeeded the POWER5#POWER5+, POWER5+ as IBM's flagship Power microprocessor. It i ...

storage keys ** ProbeVue dynamic tracing ** Systems Director Console for AIX ** Integrated filesystem snapshot ** Requires

or newer CPUs ** AIX 6 withdrawn from Marketing effective April 2016 and from Support effective April 2017 * AIX 5L 5.3, August 13, 2004, end of support April 30, 2012 ** NFS Version 4 ** Advanced Accounting ** Virtual

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

** Virtual

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

** Exploitation of

Simultaneous multithreading Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a technique for improving the overall efficiency of superscalar CPUs with hardware multithreading. SMT permits multiple independent threads of execution to better use the resources provided by modern proces ...

(SMT) ** Micro-Partitioning enablement ** POWER5 exploitation ** JFS2 quotas ** Ability to shrink a JFS2 filesystem ** Kernel scheduler has been enhanced to dynamically increase and decrease the use of virtual processors. * AIX 5L 5.2, October 18, 2002, end of support April 30, 2009 ** Ability to run on the IBM BladeCenter JS20 with the

PowerPC 970 The PowerPC 970, PowerPC 970FX, and PowerPC 970MP are 64-bit PowerPC CPUs from IBM introduced in 2002. Apple branded the 970 as PowerPC G5 for its Power Mac G5. Having created the PowerPC architecture in the early 1990s via the AIM alliance, t ...

** Minimum level required for POWER5 hardware ** MPIO for

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to Server (computing), servers in storage area networks (SAN) in ...

disks **

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...

Initiator software ** Participation in Dynamic LPAR ** Concurrent I/O (CIO) feature introduced for JFS2 released in Maintenance Level 01 in May 2003 * AIX 5L 5.1, May 4, 2001, end of support April 1, 2006 ** Ability to run on an

architecture processor, although this never went beyond beta. ** Minimum level required for POWER4 hardware and the last release that worked on the

Micro Channel architecture Micro Channel architecture, or the Micro Channel bus, is a proprietary hardware, proprietary 16-bit computing, 16- or 32-bit computing, 32-bit parallel communication, parallel computer bus (computing), bus publicly introduced by IBM in 1987 w ...

** 64-bit kernel, installed but not activated by default ** JFS2 ** Ability to run in a Logical Partition on

** The L stands for

affinity **

Trusted Computing Base The trusted computing base (TCB) of a computer system is the set of all hardware, firmware, and/or software components that are critical to its security, in the sense that bugs or vulnerabilities occurring inside the TCB might jeopardize the ...

(TCB) ** Support for mirroring with striping * AIX 4.3.3, September 17, 1999 ** Online

backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "wikt:back ...

function ** Workload Manager (WLM) ** Introduction of topas utility * AIX 4.3.2, October 23, 1998 * AIX 4.3.1, April 24, 1998 ** First TCSEC security evaluation, completed December 18, 1998 * AIX 4.3, October 31, 1997 ** Ability to run on 64-bit

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructi ...

CPUs **

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

** Web-based System Manager * AIX 4.2.1, April 25, 1997 ** NFS Version 3 ** Y2K-compliant * AIX 4.2, May 17, 1996 * AIX 4.1.5, November 8, 1996 * AIX 4.1.4, October 20, 1995 * AIX 4.1.3, July 7, 1995 ** CDE 1.0 became the default GUI environment, replacing the AIXwindows Desktop. * AIX 4.1.1, October 28, 1994 * AIX 4.1, August 12, 1994 ** AIX Ultimedia Services introduced (multimedia drivers and applications) * AIX 4.0, 1994 ** Run on RS/6000 systems with

processors and PCI busses. * AIX 3.2.5, October 15, 1993 * AIX 3.2 1992 * AIX 3.1, (General Availability) February 1990 ** Journaled File System ( JFS) filesystem type ** AIXwindows Desktop (based on X.desktop from IXI Limited) * AIX 3.0 1989 (Early Access) ** LVM ( Logical Volume Manager) was incorporated into OSF/1, and in 1995 for HP-UX, and the Linux LVM implementation is similar to the HP-UX LVM implementation. ** SMIT was introduced.

IBM System/370 releases

* AIX/ESA Version 2 Release 2 ** Announced December 15, 1992 ** Available February 26, 1993 ** Withdrawn Jun 19, 1993 ** Runs only in S/370-ESA mode * AIX/ESA Version 2 Release 1 ** Announced March 31, 1992 ** Available June 26, 1992 ** Withdrawn Jun 19, 1993 ** Runs only in S/370-ESA mode * AIX/370 Version 1 Release 2.1 ** Announced February 5, 1991 ** Available February February 22, 1991 ** Withdrawn December 31, 1992 ** Does not run in XA, ESA or z mode * AIX/370 Version 1 Release 1 ** Announced March 15, 1988 ** Available February 16, 1989 ** Does not run in XA, ESA or z mode

IBM PS/2 releases

* AIX PS/2 v1.3, October 1992 ** Withdrawn from sale in US, March 1995 ** Patches supporting IBM ThinkPad 750C family of notebook computers, 1994 ** Patches supporting non PS/2 hardware and systems, 1993 * AIX PS/2 v1.2.1, May 1991 * AIX PS/2 v1.2, March 1990 * AIX PS/2 v1.1, March 1989

IBM RT releases

* AIX RT v2.2.1, March 1991 * AIX RT v2.2, March 1990 * AIX RT v2.1, March 1989 ** X-Windows included on installation media * AIX RT v1.1, 1986 * AIX RT v1.0, 1985

User interfaces

The default shell was

Bourne shell The Bourne shell (sh) is a shell command-line interpreter for computer operating systems. It first appeared on Version 7 Unix, as its default shell. Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh—which will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic lin ...

up to AIX version 3, and

KornShell KornShell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn (computer scientist), David Korn at Bell Labs in the early 1980s and announced at USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX on July 14, 1983. The initial development was base ...

(ksh88) in version 4 for XPG4 and

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

compliance.

Graphical

The

Common Desktop Environment The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif (software), Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98, UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop a ...

(CDE) is AIX's default

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

. As part of Linux Affinity and the free AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications (ATLA), open-source

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...

and

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

desktops are also available.

System Management Interface Tool

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 function key which generates the command line that SMIT will invoke to complete it. SMIT also generates a log of commands that are performed in the smit.script file. The smit.script file automatically records the commands with the command flags and parameters used. The smit.script file can be used as an executable shell script to rerun system configuration tasks. SMIT also creates the smit.log file, which contains additional detailed information that can be used by programmers in extending the SMIT system. smit and smitty refer to the same program, though smitty invokes the text-based version, while smit will invoke an X Window System based interface if possible; however, if smit determines that X Window System capabilities are not present, it will present the text-based version instead of failing. Determination of X Window System capabilities is typically performed by checking for the existence of the DISPLAY variable.

Database

Object Data Manager (ODM) is a database of system information integrated into AIX, analogous to the registry in

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. A good understanding of the ODM is essential for managing AIX systems. Data managed in ODM is stored and maintained as objects with associated attributes. Interaction with ODM is possible via

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

(API)

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

for programs, and command-line utilities such as ''odmshow'', ''odmget'', ''odmadd'', ''odmchange'' and ''odmdelete'' for

shell script A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be command languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipu ...

s and users. SMIT and its associated AIX commands can also be used to query and modify information in the ODM. ODM is stored on disk using Berkeley DB files. Example of information stored in the ODM database are: * Network configuration *

Logical volume management In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes to store volumes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, ...

configuration *Installed software information *Information for logical devices or

software driver In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...

s *List of all AIX supported devices *Physical hardware devices installed and their configuration *Menus, screens and commands that SMIT uses

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Aix IBM AIX Power ISA operating systems PowerPC operating systems

IBM Aix AIX (pronounced ) is a series of Proprietary software, proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM since 1986. The name stands for "Advanced Interactive eXecutive". Current versions are designed to work with Power ISA based ...

Object-oriented database management systems 1986 software X86 operating systems