[Milberg09] 2.2. AIX - AIX 简史

2.2. AIX

AIXwas the first operating system to introduce the idea of a journalingfile system, an advance that enabled fast boot times by avoiding theneed to perform file system checking (fsck)for disks on reboot. AIX also has a strong, built-in Logical VolumeManager (LVM), introduced as early as 1990, which helps to partitionand administer groups of disks.

Anotherimportant innovation was the introduction of shared libraries, whichavoided the need for an application to statically link to the librariesit used. The resulting smaller binaries used less of the hardware RAMto run and required less disk space for installation.

IBMported AIX to its RS/6000 platform of products in 1989. The release ofAIX Version 3 coincided with the announcement of the first RS/6000models. At the time, these systems were considered unique in that theynot only outperformed all other machines in integer compute performancebut also beat the competition by a factor of 10 in floating-pointperformance.

Version4, introduced in 1994, added support for symmetric multiprocessing(SMP) with the first RS/6000 SMP servers. The operating system evolveduntil 1999, when AIX 4.3.3 introduced workload management (WLM). In May2001, IBM unveiled AIX 5L (the L stands for "Linux affinity"),coinciding with the release of its POWER4 servers, which provided forthe logical partitioning of servers. In October of the following year,IBM announced dynamic logical partitioning (DLPAR) with AIX 5.2.

Thelatest update to AIX 5L, AIX 5.3 (introduced in August 2004), providedinnovative new features for virtualization, security, reliability,systems management, and administration. Most important, AIX 5.3 fullysupported the Advanced Power Virtualization (APV) capabilities of thePOWER5 architecture, including micropartioning, virtual I/O servers,and symmetric multithreading (SMT). Arguably, this was the mostimportant release of AIX in more than a decade, and it remains the mostpopular (as of this writing). That is why we'll primarily focus on AIX5.3 for the purposes of this book.