AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive, pronounced , "ay-eye-ex") is a series of proprietary

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser 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, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s developed and sold by IBM for several of its computer platforms.

Background

Originally released for the

IBM RT PC The IBM RT PC (RISC Technology Personal Computer) is a family of workstation computers from IBM introduced in 1986. These were the first commercial computers from IBM that were based on a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture. T ...

RISC In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set compu ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or 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 systems. The term ''worksta ...

in 1986, AIX has supported a wide variety of hardware platforms, including the IBM

RS/6000 The RISC System/6000 (RS/6000) is a family of RISC-based Unix servers, workstations and supercomputers made by IBM in the 1990s. The RS/6000 family replaced the IBM RT PC computer platform in February 1990 and was the first computer line to s ...

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– IBM ...

-based systems,

IBM System i The IBM AS/400 (Application System/400) is a family of midrange computers from IBM announced in June 1988 and released in August 1988. It was the successor to the System/36 and System/38 platforms, and ran the OS/400 operating system. Lower-co ...

System/370 The IBM System/370 (S/370) is a model range of IBM mainframe computers announced on June 30, 1970, as the successors to the System/360 family. The series mostly maintains backward compatibility with the S/360, allowing an easy migration path f ...

mainframes, PS/2 personal computers, and the Apple Network Server. It is currently supported on

IBM Power Systems Power Systems is a family of server computers from IBM that are based on its Power processors. It was created in 2008 as a merger of the System p and System i product lines. History IBM had two distinct POWER- and PowerPC-based hardware l ...

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 i ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

. 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 marks of the Single UNIX Specification, beginning with AIX versions 5.3 and 7.2 TL5 respectively. Older versions were previously certified to the UNIX 95 and UNIX 98 marks. AIX was the first operating system to have 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 ...

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

virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, st ...

, 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 describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specifi ...

ported 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 started life at

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

research center in the early 1970s, running on DEC

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

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

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

, where Tom Lyon and others ported it to the S/370, to run as a guest OS under

VM/370 VM (often: VM/CMS) is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers. The following version ...

. This port would later grow out to become UTS, a mainframe Unix offering by IBM's competitor Amdahl Corporation. IBM's own involvement in Unix can be dated to 1979, when it assisted Bell Labs in doing its own Unix port to the 370 (to be used as a build host for the 5ESS switch's software). In the process, IBM made modifications to the TSS/370

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

to better support Unix. It took until 1985 for IBM to offer its own Unix on the S/370 platform, IX/370, which was 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 ...

and intended by IBM to compete with Amdahl UTS. The operating system offered special facilities for interoperating with PC/IX, Interactive/IBM's version of Unix for

IBM PC compatible IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones ...

hardware, and was licensed at $10,000 per sixteen concurrent users. AIX Version 1, introduced in 1986 for the

, was based on

Releases 1 and 2. In developing AIX, IBM and

(whom IBM contracted) also incorporated source code from 4.2 and 4.3

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...

UNIX. Among other variants, IBM later produced AIX Version 3 (also known as AIX/6000), based on System V Release 3, for their

POWER Power most often refers to: * Power (physics), meaning "rate of doing work" ** Engine power, the power put out by an engine ** Electric power * Power (social and political), the ability to influence people or events ** Abusive power Power may ...

-based

platform. Since 1990, AIX has served as the primary operating system for the RS/6000 series (later renamed ''

IBM eServer IBM eServer was a family of computer servers from IBM. Announced in 2000, it combined the various IBM server brands (AS/400, Netfinity, RS/6000, S/390) under one brand. The various sub-brands were at the same time rebranded from: *IBM RS/6000 to ...

pSeries'', then ''

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 now ''

''). 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 ...

with the introduction of the first RS/6000 SMP servers and continued to evolve through the 1990s, culminating with AIX 4.3.3 in 1999. Version 4.1, in a slightly modified form, was also the standard operating system for the Apple Network Server systems sold by

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

to complement the

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

line. In the late 1990s, under

Project Monterey Project Monterey was an attempt to build a single Unix operating system that ran across a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, as well as supporting multi-processing. Announced in October 1998, several Unix vendors were involved; IBM provide ...

, 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 ...

planned to integrate AIX and UnixWare into a single

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calcula ...

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A comp ...

multiplatform UNIX with particular emphasis on running on

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

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

(Itanium) architecture CPUs. A

beta test A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

version of AIX 5L for IA-64 systems was released, but according to documents released in the ''

SCO v. IBM ''SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.'', commonly abbreviated as ''SCO v. IBM'', is a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah. The SCO Group asserted that there are legal uncertainties regarding the use of ...

'' lawsuit, less than forty licenses for the finished Monterey Unix were ever sold before the project was terminated in 2002. 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 ...

alleged that (among other infractions) IBM had misappropriated licensed

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

from

Release 4 for incorporation into AIX; SCO subsequently withdrew IBM's license to develop and distribute AIX. IBM maintains that their license was irrevocable, and continued to sell and support the product until the litigation was adjudicated. AIX was a component of the 2003 ''

'' lawsuit, in which the

filed a lawsuit against IBM, alleging IBM contributed SCO's intellectual property to the

codebase. The

, who argued they were the rightful owners of the copyrights covering the

operating system, attempted to revoke IBM's license to sell or distribute the AIX operating system. In March 2010, a jury returned a verdict finding 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 Novell NetWare. Under the l ...

, not the SCO Group, owns the rights to Unix. IBM AIX logo (pre 2021)

AIX 6 was announced in May 2007, and it ran as an open beta from June 2007 until the general availability (GA) of AIX 6.1 on November 9, 2007. Major new features in AIX 6.1 included full

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. It is an approach to implement mandatory access control (MAC) or discretionary access control ...

workload partitions AIX Workload partitions (WPARs) are a software implementation of operating system-level virtualization technology introduced in the IBM's AIX 6.1 operating system that provides application environment isolation and resource control. WPARs are s ...

(which enable application mobility), enhanced security (Addition of AES encryption type for NFS v3 and v4), 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 VMware VMot ...

on the POWER6 hardware. AIX 7.1 was announced in April 2010, and an open beta ran until general availability of AIX 7.1 in September 2010. Several new features, including better scalability, enhanced clustering and management capabilities were added. AIX 7.1 includes a new built-in clustering capability called Cluster Aware AIX. AIX is able to organize multiple LPARs through the multipath communications channel to neighboring CPUs, enabling very high-speed communication between processors. This enables multi-terabyte memory address range and page table access to support global petabyte shared memory space for AIX POWER7 clusters so that software developers can program a cluster as if it were a single system, without using message passing (i.e. semaphore-controlled Inter-process Communication). AIX administrators can use this new capability to cluster a pool of AIX nodes. By default, AIX V7.1 pins kernel memory and includes support to allow applications to pin their kernel stack. Pinning kernel memory and the kernel stack for applications with real-time requirements can provide performance improvements by ensuring that the kernel memory and kernel stack for an application is not paged out. AIX 7.2 was announced in October 2015, and released in December 2015. The principal feature of AIX 7.2 is the Live Kernel Update capability, which allows OS fixes to replace the entire AIX kernel with no impact to applications, by live migrating workloads to a temporary surrogate AIX OS partition while the original OS partition is patched. AIX 7.2 was also restructured to remove obsolete components. The networking component, bos.net.tcp.client was repackaged to allow additional installation flexibility. Unlike AIX 7.1, AIX 7.2 is only supported on systems based on POWER7 or later processors.

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

, who 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 IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a tea ...

for IBM as PC/IX. According to its developers, the AIX source (for this initial version) consisted of one million lines of code. Installation media consisted of eight 1.2M floppy disks. The RT was based on the

IBM ROMP The ROMP is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessor designed by IBM in the late 1970s. It is also known as the Research OPD Miniprocessor (after the two IBM divisions that collaborated on its inception, IBM Research and the Offi ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...

, the first commercial

chip. This was based on a design pioneered at IBM Research (the

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 was 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 were all controlled by a microkernel. One could "hotkey" from one operating system to the next using the Alt-Tab key combination. Each OS in turn would get possession of the keyboard, mouse and display. Besides AIX v2, the

PICK OS The Pick Operating System (Pick System or Pick) is a demand-paged, multi-user, virtual memory, time-sharing computer operating system based around a MultiValue database. Pick is used primarily for business data processing. It is named after one ...

also included this microkernel. Much of the AIX v2 kernel was written in the

PL/8 PL.8 is a dialect of PL/I developed by IBM Research in the 1970s by compiler group, under Martin Hopkins, within a major research program that led to the IBM RISC architecture. It was so-called because it was about 80% of PL/I. Written in PL/I and ...

programming language, which proved troublesome during the migration to AIX v3. AIX v2 included full

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

networking, as well as

SNA SNA or Sna may refer to: Organizations * Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency), Bulgaria's largest English-language news provider * Shanni Nationalities Army * Singapore National Academy, a school in Surabaya, Indonesia * Sky News Australia, an Austr ...

and two networking file systems: NFS, licensed from

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

, and

Distributed Services Distribution may refer to: Mathematics *Distribution (mathematics), generalized functions used to formulate solutions of partial differential equations *Probability distribution, the probability of a particular value or value range of a varia ...

(DS). DS had the distinction of being built on top of SNA, and thereby being fully compatible with DS on and on midrange systems running

OS/400 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 ...

through

. For the graphical user interfaces, AIX v2 came 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 provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting ...

from MIT, together 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 distributed operating system at UCLA. Locus was notable for commercializing sing ...

under contract to IBM. AIX PS/2, first released in October 1988, ran 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 PC, XT, AT, and PC Convertible in IBM's lineup. Many of the PS/2's innovations, such as the 16550 UART (serial p ...

personal computers with

Intel 386 The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors uucp UUCP is an acronym of Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the ...

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

nroff nroff (short for "new roff") is a text-formatting program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It produces output suitable for simple fixed-width printers and terminal windows. It is an integral part of the Unix help system, being used t ...

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. While nroff was inte ...

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 featured a graphical environment called the AIXwindows Desktop, based on IXI's

X.desktop X.desktopSee X.desktop 3 details provided by SCO at was an early desktop environment graphical user interface built on the X Window System. It was developed and sold during the late 1980s and early 1990s by IXI Limited, a British software house ...

. The C and FORTRAN compilers each had a price tag of $275. Locus also made available their

DOS Merge Merge is a software system which allows a user to run DOS/Windows 3.1 on SCO UNIX, in an 8086 virtual machine. History Merge was originally developed to run DOS under UNIX System V Release 2 on an AT&T 6300 Plus personal computer. Developme ...

virtual machine environment for AIX, which could 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 the workstations that are ab ...

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 l ...

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 Computing. AIX/370 was IBM's fourth attempt to offer

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X 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 Unix-li ...

functionality for their mainframe line, specifically the

(the prior versions were a TSS/370-based Unix system developed jointly with AT&T c.1980, a

-based system named VM/IX developed jointly with

c.1984, and a

-based version of TSS/370 named IX/370 which was upgraded to be compatible with

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 ...

). 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 The IBM System/390 is a discontinued mainframe product family implementing the ESA/390, the fifth generation of the System/360 instruction set architecture. The first computers to use the ESA/390 were the Enterprise System/9000 (ES/9000) ...

architecture, AIX/370 was replaced by AIX/ESA in 1991, which was based on

OSF/1 OSF/1 is a variant of the Unix operating system developed by the Open Software Foundation during the late 1980s and early 1990s. OSF/1 is one of the first operating systems to have used the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University, an ...

, and also ran on the

System/390 The IBM System/390 is a discontinued mainframe product family implementing the ESA/390, the fifth generation of the System/360 instruction set architecture. The first computers to use the ESA/390 were the Enterprise System/9000 (ES/9000) ...

platform. This development effort was made partly to allow IBM to compete with

Amdahl Amdahl may refer to: People * Einar Amdahl (1888-1974), Norwegian theologist * Bjarne Amdahl (1903-1968), Norwegian pianist and composer * Douglas K. Amdahl Douglas K. Amdahl (January 23, 1919 – August 24, 2010) was an American lawyer and j ...

UTS. Unlike AIX/370, AIX/ESA ran 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 Multiple Virtual Storage, more commonly called MVS, was the most commonly used operating system on the System/370 and System/390 IBM mainframe computers. IBM developed MVS, along with OS/VS1 and SVS, as a successor to OS/360. It is unrelated ...

, 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

, IBM released a

version of AIX 5L for the IA-64 (

Itanium Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance comp ...

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

Apple Network Servers

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

to have numerous high-end features that standard Apple hardware did not have, including swappable hard drives, redundant power supplies, and external monitoring capability. These systems were 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 Computer as the core of the Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by ''MacWorld'' as "the most important te ...

hardware available at the time but were 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 was 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 Apple Computer's Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by ...

, Apple's earlier version of Unix for

68k The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and ...

-based

es.

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 The POWER1 is a multi-chip CPU developed and fabricated by IBM that implemented the POWER instruction set architecture (ISA). It was originally known as the RISC System/6000 CPU or, when in an abbreviated form, the RS/6000 CPU, before introdu ...

-based IBM

models in 1990. AIX v3 innovated in several ways on the software side. It was the first operating system to introduce the idea of a

, JFS, which allowed 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 consistency check'') is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. A similar command, CHKDSK, exists in Microsoft Wind ...

) on every reboot. Another innovation was

shared libraries In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and su ...

which avoid the need for static linking from an application to the libraries it used. The resulting smaller binaries used less of the hardware RAM to run, and used less disk space to install. Besides improving performance, it was a boon to developers: executable binaries could be in the tens of

kilobyte The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix '' kilo'' as 1000 (103); per this definition, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes.International Standard IEC 80000-13 Quanti ...

s instead of a megabyte for an executable statically linked to the

C library The C standard library or libc is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard. ISO/ IEC (2018). '' ISO/IEC 9899:2018(E): Programming Languages - C §7'' Starting from the original ANSI C standard, it wa ...

. AIX v3 also scrapped the microkernel of AIX v2, a contentious move that resulted in v3 containing no

code and being somewhat more "pure" than v2. Other notable subsystems included: *

IRIS GL IRIS GL (Integrated Raster Imaging System Graphics Library) is a proprietary graphics API created by Silicon Graphics (SGI) in the early 1980s for producing 2D and 3D computer graphics on their IRIX-based IRIS graphical workstations. Later SGI re ...

, a 3D rendering library, the progenitor of

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve ha ...

. IRIS GL was licensed by IBM from SGI in 1987, then still a fairly 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 Gouraud shading, named after Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes. In practice, Gouraud shading is most often used to achieve continuous li ...

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 PHIGS (Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System) is an application programming interface (API) standard for rendering 3D computer graphics, considered to be the 3D graphics standard for the 1980s through the early 1990s. Subsequently ...

, another 3D rendering API, popular in automotive CAD/CAM circles, and at the core of

CATIA CATIA (, an acronym of computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application) is a multi-platform software suite for computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), computer-aided engineering (CAE), 3D modeling and Product ...

. * Full implementation of version 11 of the

, together with

Motif Motif may refer to: General concepts * Motif (chess composition), an element of a move in the consideration of its purpose * Motif (folkloristics), a recurring element that creates recognizable patterns in folklore and folk-art traditions * Moti ...

as the recommended widget toolkit and window manager. * Network file systems: NFS from

Sun The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared rad ...

; 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 t ...

; and DFS, the

Distributed File System A clustered file system is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system (only direct attached storage for ...

. * NCS, the

Network Computing System The Network Computing System (NCS) was an implementation of the Network Computing Architecture (NCA). It was created at Apollo Computer in the 1980s. It comprised a set of tools for implementing distributed software applications, or distributed com ...

, licensed from

Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc., founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo w ...

(later acquired by HP). * DPS on-screen display system. This was notable as a "plan B" in case the X11+Motif combination failed in the marketplace. However, it was highly proprietary, supported only by Sun,

NeXT Next may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare * ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage * '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film Lit ...

, and IBM. This cemented its failure in the marketplace in the face of the open systems challenge of X11+Motif and its lack of 3D capability. In addition, AIX applications can run in the

PASE Pase or PASE may refer to: * Pasé language, an extinct Arawakan language * Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England * Portable Applications Solutions Environment * Dunaújváros PASE Dunaújváros Pálhalma Agrospeciál Sport Egyesület is a H ...

subsystem under

Versions

Version history

POWER/PowerPC 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 ...

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 RDMA over Converged Ethernet, RoCE adds support of the Oracle RDSv3 protocol over the Mellanox Connect RoCE adapters ** Requires POWER7 or newer CPUs ** Supports secure boot on POWER9 systems. * 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 or newer CPUs * AIX V6.1, November 9, 2007 ** Workload Partitions (WPARs) operating system-level virtualization ** Live Application Mobility **

** Security *** Role Based Access Control RBAC *** 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 storage keys ** ProbeVue dynamic tracing ** Systems Director Console for AIX ** Integrated Snapshot (computer storage), filesystem snapshot ** Requires POWER4 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 ** Virtual Ethernet ** Exploitation of Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) ** Micro-Partitioning enablement ** POWER5 exploitation ** IBM Journaled File System 2 (JFS2), 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 ** Minimum level required for POWER5 hardware ** multipath I/O, MPIO for Fibre Channel disks ** iSCSI Initiator software ** Participation in Dynamic Logical Partitioning, 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 IA-64 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 ** 64-bit Kernel (operating system), kernel, installed but not activated by default ** JFS2 ** Ability to run in a LPAR, Logical Partition on POWER4 ** The L stands for

affinity ** Trusted Computing Base (TCB) ** Support for mirroring with striping * AIX 4.3.3, September 17, 1999 ** Online backup function ** Workload Manager (WLM) ** Introduction of topas utility * AIX 4.3.2, October 23, 1998 * AIX 4.3.1, April 24, 1998 ** First Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, TCSEC security evaluation, completed December 18, 1998 * AIX 4.3, October 31, 1997 ** Ability to run on 64-bit CPU design, architecture CPUs ** IPv6 ** 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 ** Common Desktop Environment, 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 Peripheral Component Interconnect, PCI busses. * AIX 3.2 1992 * AIX 3.1, (General Availability) February 1990 ** Journaled File System ( JFS) filesystem type ** AIXwindows Desktop (based on

from IXI Limited) * AIX 3.0 1989 (Early Access) ** LVM (Logical Volume Manager (AIX), 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. ** IBM AIX SMIT, SMIT was introduced.

IBM System/370 releases

* AIX/370 Version 1 Release 1 ** Announced March 15, 1988 ** Available February 16, 1989 * AIX/370 Version 1 Release 2.1 ** Announced February 5, 1991 ** Available February February 22, 1991 ** Withdrawn December 31, 1992 * AIX/ESA Version 2 Release 1 ** Announced March 31, 1992 ** Available June 26, 1992 ** Withdrawn Jun 19, 1993 * AIX/ESA Version 2 Release 2 ** Announced December 15, 1992 ** Available February 26, 1993 ** Withdrawn Jun 19, 1993

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 up to AIX version 3, but was changed to KornShell (ksh88) in version 4 for XPG4 and POSIX compliance.

Graphical

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is AIX's default graphical user interface. As part of Linux Affinity and the free AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications (ATLA), open-source KDE Plasma Workspaces and GNOME desktop are also available.

System Management Interface Tool

IBM AIX SMIT, 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 Windows registry, registry in Microsoft Windows. A good understanding of the ODM is essential for managing AIX systems. Data managed in ODM is stored and maintained as Object (computer science), objects with associated Attribute (computing), attributes. Interaction with ODM is possible via application programming interface (API) Library (computing), library for programs, and command-line utilities such as ''odmshow'', ''odmget'', ''odmadd'', ''odmchange'' and ''odmdelete'' for shell scripts and users. System Management Interface Tool, 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: *Computer network, Network configuration *Logical volume management configuration *Installed software information *Information for logical devices or software drivers *List of all AIX supported devices *Physical hardware devices installed and their configuration *Menus, screens and commands that SMIT uses

References

External links

IBM AIX
{{DEFAULTSORT:Aix IBM operating systems Power ISA operating systems PowerPC operating systems UNIX System V, IBM Aix Object-oriented database management systems 1986 software