AIX Running on Apple's M1 | Hacker News Reader

AIX Running on Apple's M1

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57 pointsrbanffy27 comments

> AIX Running [inside Qemu] on Apple's M1

FTFY; It is still interesting, but leaving that little detail out in the HN submission is IMO a bit clickbaity.

The intent was kind of joking, but I can’t fix it myself anymore. If an admin can make it more descriptive, like “emulating an AIX workstation on an M1” it’d be perfect.

There have been a lot of these lately, eg "build your own sparc machine" but it's a Raspberry Pi. Not exactly the same thing.

We seem to be having a lot of "emulators for old Unix boxes exist" posts recently?

It's sort of neat, but kinda not news really.

Now, I'm off to port Hercules to QNX to make my car an IBM mainframe.

Yes, not news but definitely interesting. Some of these old unixes were only available for multi-thousand dollar machines. Current computers are powerful enough to run these systems somewhat comfortably inside emulators or using JIT or dynamic binary translation...

If 30 years ago you dreamed on using any of those systems, now you can do it.

On the other hand, the only real reason you’d want to run AIX is because you had to, because you had the hardware and there was no other option.

I think AIX 5L is what provided RS/6000 owners and developers an offramp to Linux.

I enjoy posts like this because they’re true to a “hacker” mindset: Implementing an unconventional approach - either for use or novelty.

Thinking outside of the box, while a cliche these days was clearly done here. Who else wakes up and thinks, “I wonder if I could run Aix on an M1?” :)

I can confirm. I worked at an AIX and Linux shop for about 4 years in the early 2000's. We had a couple of "enterprise" customers who didn't yet trust Linux for their critical applications. It was IBM all the way.

Note, that for that era, AIX was a very solid choice. Only other real option was Sun/Solaris, which was dying after the dot-com implosion.

I worked with AIX on Power5/5+ (mid 2000s) and their hypervisor for LPARs and what they called micro-LPARs at the time was astonishingly good. It provided very nice granularity and control for running multiple LPARs. An LPAR is like a VM, but is closer to bare-metal than what you find in an Intel environment. You had to allocate at least 1/10th of a virtual processor per LPAR. They had something called 'entitled capacity' where you could specify the minimum amount of CPU allocation the LPAR would get even if all LPARs running on the same hardware were running 100% busy at the same time.

It all worked exactly as advertised. I was on a small team that did performance monitoring, optimizations, and capacity planning and we watched the metrics very closely for production workloads (running DB2). It was seriously impressive.

100% agree they always have worked in my experience too, still have the pleasure of occasional use of POWER7/8. I always recommended POWER/AIX for reliable compute where budget and s/w compatibility allowed.

LPARs -- "Logical Partitions"

I know the industry is full of technical jargon, but IBM is its own universe that pre-dates all of it.

Are LPARs like virtual machines, or like FreeBSD jails (which are like Docker containers, I think)? I get the impression that LPARs are full virtual machines -- each one could be running a different kernel as well as userland.

LPARs are like full VMs on POWER/AIX, they run atop the Power VM hypervisor

https://developer.ibm.com/articles/cl-hypervisorcompare-powe...

It's more like virtual machines. You had to use PowerVM, which would take care of virtual I/O, memory, cpu and network. You were able to split in micro partitions and do live partition migrations. In those LPARs you could then use WPARs, which was more like FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones. You had two options for it: application wpars and system wpars. I've used AIX[with all hw ecosystem] for many years as a main driver in a bank, and it was ahead of everything else in the market. Still brings good memories - loved it.

As a young nerd, I heard many times more than once “AIX” pronounced “aches”. Deliberately, mind you.

Or just for the fun of it as a hobbyist.

Yeah agreed. There was the adafruit one too.

Though I'd love to see a PA-RISC emulator for the old HP-UX with VUE. But that's not around unfortunately.

Seems that 32-bit mode emulation mode of PA-RISC is available, and HP-UX 9 to 11 runs on it:

* https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Qemu

* https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2019/04/28/running-hp-ux-11-...

There doesn't seem to be enough interest to really make more capabilities a priority beyond hobby-level interest:

* https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/HPPA

Nice one!! I looked a few years back and it wasn't there. Will try it.

You can run HP-UX 9.0 on top of MAME, and get VUE in an emulated environment. I have tried this myself and can confirm that it works.

https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Running_HP-UX_9.0_o...

Hmm interesting. I haven't used HPUX 9 and am more interested in 10.20 as this was what I used back in the day (on PA-RISC, I think this was no longer supported on Motorola).

But I'll try it nevertheless. Thanks!

Of those, I found the NeXTSTEP one to be the most interesting. Because the software was the most interesting part of NeXT and you can experience it and see where a lot of current tech came from. InterfaceBuilder at the time was mind-blowing. You can see where XCode autolayout comes from and why many classes are named NS*.

I also prefer the NeXTSTEP filebrowser to be the most convenient to use, especially the long operations that don't open windows to say "hey, I'm still doing this over here." Even the menu shortcut labeling was simple, 'p' means menu-p, and 'P' means menu-shift-P, and '^p'/'^P' for ctrl-p/ctrl-shift-p.

In case anyone wants to try AIX 7.2 with QEMU:

https://kwakousys.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/run-aix-7-2-on-x8...

I miss SMITty!

Yes and was chatting with an IBM rep in the 90's about SMIT or smitty for the tty terminal flavour and was told the hardest part was the running man icon at the top right. Getting that to run at the same speed upon all hardware took some effort from all accounts. But darn - smit just made anybody who could type it and some basic understandings an AIX admin and what I really really loved about smit was you could press (F6 or some other function key) to display the exact command/script that would be run. So you could use smit to craft together what was needed for your own scripts and save time and get it right with ease.

Still miss the running joke about AIX though - it's unix with a registry :).

I spent many happy years using AIX at IBM then in banking in the 90s. Miss those days.

SMIT and smitty made AIX system administration somewhat tolerable as it could insulate you from having to figure out the incredibly arcane commands and arguments for that environment. SMIT and smitty worked exceptionally well.

It did indeed as the commands were horrible to try to piece together otherwise. Probably the best interactive help I've ever used from the console.

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