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.

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 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?” :)

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.