I don't know where you got the idea that IBM has frozen development of the POWER architecture and AIX. POWER7 machines are already available and POWER6 were the first to have a decimal floating point unit on silicon. AIX 6 is out and AIX 7 is due this fall. AIX 7 will leverage 1024 threads on 256 cores with the POWER7 machines.
IBM is unequaled in virtualization with DLPARs and WPARs. Developing an operating system to work with the hardware means you have unequaled diagnostics and error reporting available which Linux on Intel cannot match. AIX with micropartitioning allows one-tenth of a CPU to be allocated. PowerHA (formerly HACMP) is light years ahead of Red Hat Cluster Suite or Linux Heartbeat. The AIX LVM is unrivaled by a child-like Linux LVM which has nowhere near the capabilities. Disk management on AIX is superior and yet is painful in Linux. In AIX you can set a variable that allows a timestamp in the histoy file! (Yes, I consider that a big deal). In AIX commands are the same since 3.2 to 6.1 (IBM wisely changes the command code). With Linux, every time a new version is released you have to change commands (e.g., ext2online/resize2fs). AIX and the Performance Diagnostic Tool. Workload Manager. LoadBalancer. IBM is making a profit from POWER/AIX, I don't know why you think they'd abandon it for Intel/Linux. Linux isn't the be all of operating systems some think it is. I'd take AIX over Linux any day, and I'd take BSD over Linux any day, and I'd take Solaris over Linux any day. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
