[shellwizard]

I still have to deal with a handful of UNIX systems at $WORK mostly AIX, and I don't really like it much compared to all of the Linux boxes that we mostly use. On one hand it seems to be rock solid and all of that but on the other it's like driving a Ferrari to go to work instead of a more sensitive Toyota. Most of them are being replaced by cheaper Linux servers where memory is not so pricey and mostly feel the same, albeit some memory allocation/caching difference

[irusensei]

I did some work on AIX once. The thing that I remember is that I was granted some kind of zone/slice or wathever they call for compartmentalization. It didn't even had SSH so I had to use telnet.

The guy I was supposed to prepare the system for could only install Oracle from some crappy java UI wizard so I had to request the sysadmin to install a lot of Linux libraries and programs to enable X11 over SSH.

[whatusername]

From memory there was LPAR "Logical Partitions" - which were effectively like a VM. and there was WPAR "Workload Partitions" - which had a shared OS and were more like a container.

I had some "interesting" experiences getting stuff to work on WPAR's.

[Telemakhos]

I first learned on an AIX box in college; Cygwin/X gave me X11 access and worked perfectly, although I couldn’t tell you whether that used telnet or ssh. Back then I used telnet a lot without any regard for security.

[Rediscover]

> crappy java UI wizard

Nicely put (oof!). I believe it also enforced a minimal color depth, which none of our machines could directly support on their own hardware, forcing the use of remote X11 displays.

[_DeadFred_]

Yes we first had a world of telnet and networks that allowed anyone who pierced them with a transceiver to be part of it (thicknet). It was a simpler/kinder/less malicious world than todays.

X Windows ran great on AIX before Linux was a thing. IBM was involved with its's inception (Project Athena).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5

[cyberpunk]

Is it true that 0x00000000 is a valid memory address on aix? I’m sure I read it somewhere but struggled to confirm it..

[pavlov]

Yes, I believe this was an optimization to allow IBM’s compiler to do speculative loads before a null check.

[TickleSteve]

thats true on many systems... nothing special about 0x0 other than NULL happens to be defined as 0 in most toolchains an some functions use NULL to report an error.

[pjmlp]

Linux still has to copy a few Aix tricks, like the way lazy linking works.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

From a cursory web search, it sounds like that just loads dynamic libraries when their functions are first called? Is that really so useful compared to either loading at start or dlopen()ing if they're optional?

[gtsnexp]

Naive question: by your analogy, would a 1990s Ferrari perform today as it did back then?

[shellwizard]

I guess yes, although given today's petrol prices and environmental restrictions, it wouldn't be able to drive anywhere (at least in the EU)

[newsclues]

Absolute vs relative performance is important to consider