Farewell to AIX 5LIf you're new to AIX, you may not know that AIX 5.3 was officially called AIX 5L. And it's no longer officially supported, unless you have paid for Extended Support or are running versioned WPARs. "5L" didn't refer to a particular version of AIX 5. The "5L" applied to AIX 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3. AIX 5L for Power version 5.0 was first announced back in October 2000. On the technology side:
Why am I mentioning all of this? Because I saw a web site today with a package which includes support for AIX. AIX 5L, that is. And that was the last version of AIX mentioned. Now I was looking to install this package on a Power7 system that ran AIX 7.1. Would it work? Well, there is the IBM binary compatibility guarantee, and AIX is famously backward compatible. But what about new features? Would the package be able to take advantage of the Virtual I/O Server, Active Memory Sharing, virtual ethernet or NPIV? Admittedly, for some software, you might be happy if it is going to work without crashing, but with other software, such as for monitoring, management or job scheduling, you'll probably want something which is integrated deeply into the Power Systems architecture. For example, you'd probably want software which could talk to the Hardware Management Console (HMC), and the Power System's hypervisor. If you're advertising that your software will work on AIX 5L, and make no reference to any developments in AIX since 6.1 came out, for example, then your software is going to look a little dated. Maybe it's time to update your web site, or go back to your Playstation 2. |
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