AIX facts, history and status

[Charlie Sauer]

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.
-- 
Charlie Sauer   IBM AES/ESD, D18/802     uucp: ut-sally!ut-emx!ibmaus!sauer
                11400 Burnet Road       csnet: ibmaus!sauer at EMX.UTEXAS.EDU
                Austin, Texas 78758    aesnet: sauer at auschs  
                (512) 823-3692           vnet: SAUER at AUSVM6