I have been playing with a brand new IBM pSeries 610 that
arrived early this week. I came preinstalled with minimal
AIX 5.1, they even left out the IDE CD-ROM driver the system
needs to install any further software. As I wanted to know
if they system would work with the AIX from CD-ROM anyways I
just booted from CD and this time AIX did have an IDE CD-ROM
driver.
This time I installed most of the software I believed we
would need. I did not see the option in the install menu to
make the 64 bit kernel the default so I ended up with a 32
bit kernel. I had to test our AppleTalk kernel modules in 32
and 64 bit mode so I started with 32. After rebooting in 64
bit mode first I had no NFS mounts, the mount command was
barfing that one of the NFS kernel modules is using an old
obsolete format. Appearently I installed one package to
much, after removing the des package NFS works fine.
The AppleTalk kernel module was an easy port, just Makefile
adaptions to compile a 32 bit as well as a 64 bit module
from the same sources and archive these together into an ar
archive. The AIX kernel is smart enough to select the proper
version from the archive depending upon the mode it is
running in, pretty nifty.
While testing some stuff in 64 bit mode I noticed that
Apache (as delivered by IBM as Websphere server) did core
dump upon starting. Dbx does tell me the core file is
invalid, strange. I started httpd with dbx and the -X option
and dbx did hang. I kill -9'ed httpd and could exit dbx. I
then attempted an apachectl start and whoops, I was talking
with the service processor instead of AIX (I was sitting at
the console). I rebooted and looked at the generated vmcore
file and it did point at the kernel based linker that AIX
uses for its shared libraries, it appeared to have stumbled
across a NULL pointer while loading an httpd module.
A few of the other subsystems also produce strange failure
messages in 64 bit mode, all in all I am not convinced about
AIX 5.1 64 bit. AIX has been rock solid for me since the
early beginnings, this is really disappointing. I looked at
the AIX fixes page and tried the new order system for AIX 5
fixes as I found out that I did not yet have the latest
components. One does click on the packages needed and they
did tell me they would process my order and send me a
notification with a download URL. After a few hours waiting
no URL yet, not encouraging.