AIX stands for Advanced Interactive eXecutive which was introduced on 1986 By IBM and Interactive Systems corporation. This one based on BSD UNIX system V release 1 and two was then
upgraded to AIX 3 for IBM POWER based servers (RS/6000). Since then the OS had undergone vast development and had been released as various successful/stable versions from AIX 3.3 to AIX 6.1 with amazing enhancements on each.
The following is a brief comparison of features of the main releases.
AIX V6 6.1, November 9, 2007[2]
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Workload Partitions (WPARs) operating system-level virtualization
Live Application Mobility
Live Partition Mobility
Security
Role Based Access Control RBAC
AIX Security Expert - A system and network security hardening tool
Encrypting JFS2 filesystem
Trusted AIX
Trusted Execution
Integrated Electronic Service Agent(tm) for auto error reporting
Concurrent Kernel Maintenance
Kernel exploitation of POWER6 storage keys
ProbeVue dynamic tracing
Systems Director Console for AIX
Integrated filesystem snapshot
AIX 5L 5.3, August 13, 2004[3]
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NFS Version 4
Advanced Accounting
Virtual SCSI (5.3 can be virtual io client not 5.2)
Virtual Ethernet
Exploitation of Simultaneous multithreading (SMT)
Micro-Partitioning enablement (not 5.2 can have fractions of cpu)
POWER5 exploitation
JFS2 quotas
Ability to shrink a JFS2 filesystem (imp can reduce jfs2 fs on aix 5. chfs -a size=-1G /fs)
kernel scheduler has been enhanced to dynamically increase and decrease the use of virtual processors.
AIX 5L 5.2, October 18, 2002[4], end of support April 30, 2009[5]
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Ability to run on the IBM BladeCenter JS20 with the PowerPC 970.
Minimum level required for POWER5 hardware
MPIO for Fibre Channel disks
iSCSI Initiator software
Participation in Dynamic LPAR (DLPAR capability was introduced on 5.2
Concurrrent I/O (CIO) feature introduced for JFS2 released in Maintenance Level 01 in May 2003[6]
AIX 5L 5.1, May 4, 2001 (Support discontinued April 1, 2006)[7]
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Ability to run on an IA-64 architecture processor, although this never went beyond beta[8]
Minimum level required for POWER4 hardware and the last release that worked on the Micro Channel architecture
64-bit kernel, installed but not activated by default
JFS2
Ability to run in a Logical Partition on POWER4
The L stands for Linux affinity (allowed linux based applications to be run on AIX)
Trusted Computing Base (TCB)
Support for mirroring with striping
Below are not important just to know
AIX 4.3.3, September 17,1999
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Online backup function
Workload Manager (WLM)
Introduction of topas utility
AIX 4.3.2, October 23,1998
AIX 4.3.1, April 24,1998
AIX 4.3, October 31,1997
Ability to run on 64-bit architecture CPUs
IPv6
Web-based System Manager
AIX 4.2.1, April 25,1997
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NFS Version 3
AIX 4.2, May 17,1996 , AIX 4.1.5, November 8,1996 , AIX 4.1.4, October 20,1995 ,AIX 4.1.3, July 7,1995
CDE 1.0 became the default GUI environment, replacing Motif X Window Manager.
AIX 4.1.1, October 28,1994, AIX 4.1, August 12,1994
AIX 4.0, 1994
Run on RS/6000 systems with PowerPC processors and PCI busses.
AIX 3.2 1992
AIX 3.1, February 1990 and Journaled File System (JFS) filesystem type
AIX 3.0 1989
LVM (Logical Volume Manager) was incorporated into OSF/1, and in 1995 for HP-UX[9], and the Linux LVM implementation is similar to the HP-UX LVM implementation.[10]
SMIT was introduced.
AIX with it's advanced security features, Flexibility, Structured design with the help of ODM, ability to make full use of the p-series virtualization, is one of the best RAS
OS ever been. With it's linux affinity for applications it's set to roar.
The following link has got an intro to AIX 6.1
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/v61/index.html.
