mdeleo@lynx.northeastern.edu (09/01/88)
I was wondering if anyone out there has already seen or know something worth knowing about IBM's new "UNIX" operating system AIX ??? From what I have heard it is suppose to be 99-100% compatable with the famed SYSTEM V Unix. But how compatable will it really be ??? Will it work with the "C","Bourne", and "K" shells? Will it add alot of features that we have all been yelling for from AT&T and/or Berkley over these past years ??? Can anyone help me address these questions ??? If so please reply.... net: mdeleo@lynx.northeastern.edu acm_md@nuhub.northeastern.edu voice: 1-800-227-0707 ext: 5486 Thanks alot::: Michael Deleo Standard disclaimer and then some...... Even though I have nothing to hind. ***********************************************************************
sauer@auschs.UUCP (Charlie Sauer) (09/01/88)
The AIX Family Definition Overview, published in July, includes a matrix
listing system calls, library routines and user commands. For each item
there is an indication of whether it is present in the first release of
AIX PS/2, the 2.2.1 release of AIX/RT, the first release of AIX 370, the
AIX Family (some AIX products will have additional items not in the family),
POSIX, SVID and BSD 4.3.
I think that matrix answers most of the questions in the referenced article.
Here are the repostings:
From: sauer@auschs.UUCP (Charlie Sauer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: AIX facts, history and status
Date: 9 Jun 88 23:14:21 GMT
Organization: IBM AES, Austin, TX
Keywords: AIX
Since a future version of AIX will be core technology for the OSF products,
I think it is useful to summarize publicly announced AIX facts and status. I
am speaking for AIX, not the OSF, and I am not going to talk about the
unannounced plans for AIX. Several of us in Austin have disclosed AIX
technology in development to the OSF seed team, and I expect that OSF will
announce OSF plans with respect to AIX technology when appropriate.
AIX on the RT is now in it's fifth release, known as AIX 2.2, which is
officially available on June 24. Another release on the RT (2.2.1) and
AIX PS/2 are scheduled for September availability, and AIX/370 is scheduled
for March availability.
AIX development personnel participate actively in the POSIX committees, and
AIX is committed to POSIX compliance.
AIX was originally derived from SVR1 and SVR2. We have endeavored
to maintain the functionality in the BA sections of SVID at the SVR2 level.
There are some incompatibilities, which I personally consider minor.
Evolutionary compatibility with BSD has been part of AIX development starting
with the initial release. An abstract on 4.3 convergence is being posted
separately.
AIX also includes many components from vendors, from other universities, and
from IBM development and research.
There is a recent overview paper on AIX[1], but I will list a few of the
areas where we have focused development and research effort:
virtual memory management and mapped files. The AIX/RT pager is derived
from work originally done in the CP.R project at IBM Watson Research Center.
services for managing "real time" devices and applications.
optimizing compiler technology based on the 801 project at IBM Research[2]
and related technology, e.g., the dynamic binding code used for device
handlers.
internationalization.
integrating SNA and related communications products with Unix.
distributed system support[3].
It is our plan that AIX be consistent in both interfaces and actual
source code base across the 386, RISC and 370 platforms. (There are some
areas where consistency is not achievable due to hardware differences, e.g.,
IEEE floating point vs. 370 floating point. Given resource and schedule
pragmatics, there will be functions not present in particular platforms in
particular releases.) The AIX Family Definition Overview, to be published
next month, summarizes the system call interfaces, library routines and
commands which are common across the AIX Family. This includes the BSD
compatibility described in the accompanying abstract, X11, NFS, Distributed
Services, TCP/IP, etc.
REFERENCES:
1. L.K. Loucks and C.H. Sauer, "Advanced Interactive Executive (AIX) Operating
System Overview," IBM Systems Journal 26, 4 (1987).
2. M. Auslander and M.E. Hopkins, "An Overview of the PL.8 Compiler," Proc. of
the SIGPLAN '82 Symposium on Compiler Writing, Boston, MA.
3. C.H. Sauer, D.W. Johnson, L.K. Loucks, A.A. Shaheen-Gouda and T.A.
Smith, "RT PC Distributed Services Overview," Operating Systems
Review 21, 3 (July 1987) pp. 18-29.
- --------
From: sauer@auschs.UUCP (Charlie Sauer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Convergence of AIX and 4.3BSD
Date: 9 Jun 88 23:19:33 GMT
Organization: IBM AES, Austin, TX
Keywords: AIX BSD 4.3
Following is an abstract of a paper we plan to write:
CONVERGENCE OF AIX AND 4.3BSD
Charles H. Sauer (1)
Kathy A. Bohrer (1)
Tom Lang (1)
Conrad Minshall (2)
Gary L. Owens (1)
Kris Solem (3)
Bruce J. Walker (4)
(1) IBM Advanced Engineering Systems, Austin, TX
(2) IBM Technical Computing Systems, Palo Alto, CA
(3) formerly IBM Technical Computing Systems,
now MIPS Computer Systems
(4) LOCUS Computing Corporation, Santa Monica, CA
AIX started with a number of BSD features, e.g., 4.2 signals and concurrent
groups[1]. Over time, additional features associated with BSD, such as pty's,
select, sockets and sendmail have been added, with new features being added in
each release. Based on this experience, and experience with 4.3/RT, it
appeared that fairly strict BSD compatibility could be achieved, and the
authors and others set out to define such compatibility.
This paper describes methodology and decisions made in defining a convergence
of BSD 4.3 and AIX. This convergence will be reflected in the AIX Family
products and the version of AIX to be provided to the Open Software Foundation.
Among the goals of the work were
POSIX compliance
Base SVID functionality at the SVR2 level
Compatibility with documented and undocumented BSD 4.3 characteristics
and interfaces
Compatibility with existing AIX interfaces
Completeness - providing essentially all BSD 4.3 functions
Minimal redundancy - except in a few cases where redundancy seemed
inescapable, conflicts were resolved to provide a single merged
definition of system call, library and command interfaces. Users
and programmers should normally not be conscious of the historical
basis of the converged interface.
Portability - minimizing porting effort for users and applications
associated with existing AIX and 4.3 implementations.
In addition, many of the system administration facilities were addressed in
a converged manner. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by
success with test suites originally designed for AIX/RT and 4.3/RT prior
to the convergence effort.
ACKNOWLEGEMENT
Many others contributed to this work, including, from IBM Advanced Engineering
Systems: Rob Cordell, Jim DeGroot, Patrick Goal, Carolyn Greene, Larry Loucks,
Jim Mott, Mike Schmidt, Doug Steves and Ken Witte, from IBM Data Systems
Division, Johnny Barnes and Heinz Graalfs, from IBM Research, Marc Auslander,
from IBM Technical Computing Systems, Larry Breed, Bruce Campbell, Sanjay
Challani, Tu-An Cheng, Tri Ha, Chirag Jain, Jason Kosol, Betty Lee, Derrick Mar,
Teri McConnell, Lisa Repka (now with Evans and Sutherland), Laura Richardson
and Dave Zittin (now with Sun Microsystems), from Lachman Associates
Incorporated, Jim Norris, from LOCUS Computing Corporation, Bob Peterson,
and from Sunday and Associates, Roy Gordon.
REFERENCE:
1. L.K. Loucks and C.H. Sauer, "Advanced Interactive Executive (AIX) Operating
System Overview," IBM Systems Journal 26, 4 (1987).
--
Charlie Sauer IBM AES/ESD, D75/802 uucp: cs.utexas.edu!ibmaus!sauer
11400 Burnet Road csnet: ibmaus!sauer@CS.UTEXAS.EDU
Austin, Texas 78758 aesnet: sauer@auschs
(512) 823-3692 vnet: SAUER at AUSVM6mikep@ism780c.isc.com (Michael A. Petonic) (09/02/88)
In article <17017@adm.ARPA> mdeleo@lynx.northeastern.edu writes: >I was wondering if anyone out there has already seen or know something >worth knowing about IBM's new "UNIX" operating system AIX ??? >From what I have heard it is suppose to be 99-100% compatable with the >famed SYSTEM V Unix. But how compatable will it really be ??? Well, AIX is and has been out for a couple of years, now. It was first made for the IBM RT PC by INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. and has several different versions like the NLS and Kanji products. As has been announced, IBM plans to release AIX for the PS2 computers. It's very compatible with System V. What else can I say? >Will it work with the "C","Bourne", and "K" shells? Yes, we (at INTERACTIVE) had all three shells working on AIX. I prefer the KSH, so that was there. IBM supports and provides the Bourne shell, but I'm not sure about the CSH. I KNOW they don't provide KSH. >Will it add alot of features that we have all been yelling for from >AT&T and/or Berkley over these past years ??? No idea, here. And even if I did know, I wouldn't be able to tell you :-). -MikeP -------- Michael A. Petonic (213) 453-8649 x3247 INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation "My opinions in no way influence 2401 Colorado Blvd. the price of tea in China." Santa Monica, CA. 90404 {sdcrdcf|attunix|microsoft|sfmin}!ism780c!mikep -- Michael A. Petonic mikep@ism780c.isc.com ``Living in the pools, they soon forget about the sea.''
psloot@neabbs.UUCP (PAUL SLOOTMAN) (09/05/88)
>In article <17017@adm.ARPA> mdeleo@lynx.northeastern.edu writes: >>I was wondering if anyone out there has already seen or know something >>worth knowing about IBM's new "UNIX" operating system AIX ??? >>From what I have heard it is suppose to be 99-100% compatable with the >>famed SYSTEM V Unix. But how compatable will it really be ??? > >Well, AIX is and has been out for a couple of years, now. It was >first made for the IBM RT PC by INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. and has >several different versions like the NLS and Kanji products. > >It's very compatible with System V. What else can I say? I protest (partly). I have worked with it for about 2 months off and on; everything I saw _was_ compatible, except for the spooling -- the wonderful lp(1) spooler was not present. Its place was taken by 'print', which does everything a System 34 etc user would expect (menus for pitch, font etc.). However, it only works with IBM hardware (of course :-). For example, cal 1988 | print and cal 1988 > /dev/lp1 do _exactly_ the same thing: both end up in the queue. As a result, output from a wordprocessor (with lots of esc sequences) got treated as a string of ascii chars, and was terminated after 80 - the paper width. For the rest, the system looks fine. > >>Will it work with the "C","Bourne", and "K" shells? > >Yes, we (at INTERACTIVE) had all three shells working on >AIX. I prefer the KSH, so that was there. IBM supports and >provides the Bourne shell, but I'm not sure about the CSH. ... The csh is alive and kicking. (I didn't check for job control, as I don't have it on the other (system V) systems here... Paul Slootman ...!mcvax!neabbs!psloot
andrew@riddle.UUCP (Andrew Beattie) (09/07/88)
>I was wondering if anyone out there has already seen or know something >worth knowing about IBM's new "UNIX" operating system AIX ??? >From what I have heard it is suppose to be 99-100% compatable with the >famed SYSTEM V Unix. But how compatable will it really be ??? > I have only used it for a few hours, but I hated it! My problem was that not all serial lines are the same, you have ttys for terminals and something else for serial printers. You have stty for setting up one and something completely different (and menu driven - yeugh!) for the other. This did an excelent job of breaking all my printer interfaces. The engineer at the site tells me that everything in /etc is organised differently. Disclaimer: As I said, I only used it for a few hours - your mileage may vary.
jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) (09/13/88)
In article <807@riddle.UUCP> andrew@riddle.UUCP (Andrew Beattie) writes: >>I was wondering if anyone out there has already seen or know something >>worth knowing about IBM's new "UNIX" operating system AIX ??? > >I have only used it for a few hours, but I hated it! I have been working with it for almost a year now, and I disagree very strongly with your conclusion - but not with your specific points, as you will see below. >My problem was that not all serial lines are the same, you have ttys for >terminals and something else for serial printers. You have stty for setting >up one and something completely different (and menu driven - yeugh!) for >the other. This did an excelent job of breaking all my printer interfaces. Absolutely right. The trick here is that AIX on the RT is a "hosted" operating system; the machine is actually running something called VRM, the Virtual Resource Manager. IBM has done some very tricky things with the printer interface, and their spooling system bears no resembalance at all to either the SysV "lp" or BSD "lpr" system. However, what they have gained is that *all* printer devices look the same from AIX, whether they are connected via serial or parallel interfaces, and they all act the same regardless of whether you send things through the spooler or simply dump directly to the device. This is a very mixed blessing; it makes me crazy to have to learn yet another spooler, especially one as complex as the AIX spooler. But I sure do like defining the serial line characteristics once, and only once, and having them work correctly all the time - even if I say 'cat foo > /dev/lp0'. A more interesting side issue here is the entire area of defining and accessing devices to AIX. Defining devices to AIX is done with a utility program (called "devices", oddly enough). As far as I can tell, the major number for a given device is constant (ttys are 15, the tape drive is 1, disks are 0 and so on) but the minor number is assigned on a purely sequential basis. Serial ports are a good example of how this can drive someone with Unix experience crazy. We all know that the name of the entry in the /dev directory is basically meaningless, since I can create names or links called whatever I like. But on the RT there are several different kinds of serial ports (built in, or serial/parallel adapter, or 4-port serial card, or 8-port card, or ...). I assumed that there would be some fixed scheme to the major/minor numbers for these various types of serial ports, so I could always tell what was what; I was wrong. The major number for *all* serial ports is 15, and the minor numbers are assigned sequentially, so there is no way to tell, by name or number what port a particular serial device will be associated with. It all depends on the order the system administrator defines them in. I am still very disturbed by this every time I think about it, but I have to say that so far, in a year of working with a number of different RTs, this has never caused be a problem (yet). >The engineer at the site tells me that everything in /etc is organised >differently. Well, I disagree with the extent of this statement. *Some* things in /etc are different, most notably there is no inittab or ttys file; they have their own way of doing this. Again, there are advantages to it, but significant problems as well. Not the least of which is having to learn another way of managing things. They supply some pretty nice utility programs for doing this, but in my experience these programs don't quite address all the issues, and once I figured out where the files are that hold all the information, I've had fairly often had to go in and adjust things by hand. The important point here is that the files are in fact still plain ascii files, and can be edited if you want or need to do that rather than using their utility programs. >Disclaimer: As I said, I only used it for a few hours - your mileage >may vary. It is interesting to note that a year ago I was as rabid anti-IBM as anyone in the Unix world. I'd been burned by various of their other Unix offerings, which were consistently poor. However, I really like AIX a lot; I've previously worked extensively with Plexus and Sun systems, and provided software support and system administration for the Swiss distributor for both of these, and I can honestly say that I like AIX at least as well, if not better than, the Unix ports on either of them. jw
mfp@sobeco.UUCP (Mark F. Proudman) (09/15/88)
In article <470@pan.UUCP>, jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) writes: > But I sure do like defining the serial line > characteristics once, and only once, and having them work correctly all > the time - even if I say 'cat foo > /dev/lp0'. > The meaning of "correctly" is in doubt here. `cat foo > /dev/lp0` is not supposed to print "corrrectly". Line feeds should not be mapped to LF-CR, etc, unless I specifically tell the driver to do that. That is what `cat` is for: send this stream of bytes there, and don't f**k with it on the way. IBM, in its attempt to make the spooler friendly (the command is now "print"), has only made it inflexible. As I believe someone has pointed out earlier, much software depends on the ability to send to a device a binary stream of bytes. This is difficult under AIX. (on the RT at any rate). Mark Proudman uunet!attcan!sobeco!mfp (514) 878 9090 "It is agreed that the ice is thin here" - K&R.
mol@dutesta.UUCP (Marcel J.E. Mol) (09/18/88)
From article <379@sobeco.UUCP>, by mfp@sobeco.UUCP (Mark F. Proudman): > .... As I believe someone has pointed > out earlier, much software depends on the ability to send to a device > a binary stream of bytes. This is difficult under AIX. (on the RT at any > rate). > > Mark Proudman uunet!attcan!sobeco!mfp > (514) 878 9090 > "It is agreed that the ice is thin here" - K&R. As far as I know, "print" has a -plot option to send binary data to a printer. (Although I found some strange behaviour: Printing TeX output on a laserprinter (a 3812), needs the -plot option according to the docs. But that didn't work properly. When I removed the -plot option, printing TeX output works fine.) Marcel -- ########################################################################## Marcel Mol | UUCP: ..!dutesta!mol Delft Univ. of Tech. | BITNET: ETSTMOL@HDETUD1 Fac. of Elec. Eng. "They couldn't think of a number, Delft so they gave me a name" The Netherlands -- Rupert Hine