UNIX is 40 years old

Ken milberg
, Writer/website expert, future tech

January 04, 2010

 

UNIX History

UNIX
Originated in the late 1960s S. Ken Thompson joined the Bell lab's computer research division in 1966. He was initially engaged in multics
Project, an ambitious project that strives to create a next-generation portable operating system, but eventually fails. Dennis Ritchie is at 1968
He joined Bell Labs in and was initially engaged in multics. This project, with the participation of Bell Labs, MIT and GE, aims to develop a new computer operating system. After
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson developed UNIX in 1969. Ken Thompson
A game called space travel was developed on the GE-645 mainframe. However, this game is running too slowly on the GE machine, so Thompson
With the help of Dennis Ritchie, The PDP-7 for Dec was rewritten. This porting process prompted Ken to be a PDP-7
Develop a new operating system. This includes a file system and a new multi-task operating system. It also includes a command line interpreter and some small utilities.

This project was initially
Named UNICs, it can finally support two users at the same time, and get some economic support from Bell Labs. In 1970, Unix became the official name of such an operating system. It is in
Run on PDP-11/20 and also contain roff (a text formatter) and a text editor. In 1973, c
The language overwrites it, which makes it portable and changes the history of this operating system.

Why create UNIX? Although porting a game is a direct motive, there are two other factors. Programmers need to share resources on the same machine and multi-task functions. These innovators recognize that operating systems need to provide portability, multitasking, and multi-user functionality.

 

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Unix development and prosperity

In
In 1970s, Unix gradually became popular after many improvements. Interactive Systems, 1977
The first commercial version is provided. During this period, UC Berkeley was also improving UNIX. They released their own release version-BSD, which contains C
Shell. The at&t version was developed to release 7 in 1978, including the Bourne shell. On July 15, 1983
The number of at&t System V users reaches 45,000. At the same time, the University of California, Berkeley, released the Berkeley released
4.2bsd, which includes the TCP/IP function. Competition started-System V vs. BSD.

1986, NFS
Yes. AIX was also released for the first time. The number of UNIX installation users reaches 250,000. In 1989, at&t
A contract was signed with Sun Microsystems, Berkeley's main promoter. This gave birth to System V, release
IV. This version actually unifies System V, BSD, and XENIX. By now, the number of UNIX installation users has exceeded 1 million.

In
In early 1993, at&t sold its rights to Novell, which was looking for an operating system that was expected to be standardized. However, Novell
I didn't take good advantage of this opportunity. A few years later, they realized this when they entered the Linux field through Suse. In the end, SCO acquired Novell's Unix
The source code and technology of UNIX systems are developed by SCO. Because SCO didn't make a lot of money through this purchase, they sued Linux a few years later.
Publishers are trying to earn revenue by legal means. They claim that Linux has stolen UNIX source code. IBM is also involved in this lawsuit because IBM supports Linux
Publisher. In the end, SCO lost.

At present, there are three manufacturers in the Unix field advantage: HP (HP-UX), SUN
(Solaris) and IBM (Aix ). Most Unix users do not really care much about BSD, System V commands, and other secondary factors.
RAS (reliability, availability, and scalability) factors, performance, virtualization, and hardware integration. IBM has been very successful in the Unix field in recent years due to its outstanding performance in these aspects.

SunOS/Solaris

SunOS
Version 1.0 was released in 1983. It supports sun-1 and sun-2 systems. SunOS version 2.0 at 1985
Released in. It provides Virtual File System (VFS) and NFS. In May 1987, at&t and sun
Announcing that they will cooperate to merge System V and BSD into a version based on system V Release 4. SunOS was initially at 1983
Developed on the basis of BSD. In 1993, it was renamed Solaris (from version 5), based on at&t System V
Release IV. The first 64-bit version of Linux Solaris 7 adds support for file system metadata logging. Introduced in 2002
Solaris 9 has added support for Solaris Volume Manager and Linux functions. The most important version was introduced in 2005.
Solaris 10 contains many new features, such as support for new ZFS file systems, Solaris containers, and logical domains.

HP-UX

HP
The first version of Unix (HP-UX) was released in 1984. It was initially based on system V Release 3 and can only-
Run on PA-RISC HP 9000 platform. Version 9 introduces a character-based graphical user interface (GUI)
Sam allows you to manage the system without using the command line. Version 10 was introduced in 1995. It modifies the layout of system files and directories.
At&t svr4 is more similar. Version 11 was introduced in 1997. This is the first version that supports 64-bit addressing. Released in 2000
11i, which introduces the operating environment, that is, a layered Application Group for specific IT purposes. In 2001, version 11.20 introduced
System support. Interestingly, HP-UX is the first way to use access control lists (ACL) to manage File Permissions
UNIX. It also introduces built-in support for logical volume manager.

Why is UNIX thriving?

Xu
Many people still remember that The Byte magazine article in 1990 raised the question "is UNIX dead? At that time, Windows NT
Coming soon, making people feel the Unix outlook is not good. But 20 years later, most it directors were reluctant to run important applications on Windows servers. What makes
UNIX survived?

• Hardware support and integration
  . Unlike other operating systems such as Linux and Windows, UNIX is usually provided with vendor hardware packaging. The operating system has been optimized for specific hardware platforms, So it provides better performance and reliability.
• Operating System Support
  .
  For UNIX operating systems, all patches and update packages are composed
  The manufacturer of the brand. You do not need to search for patches on the Internet to solve the problem. In many cases, the telephone support staff will instruct the user to obtain the patch, or even guide the user to install it step by step. Provided by the vendor
  24x7 operating system support. When a machine crashes (or even all machines crash), there is always a way to seek help.
• Customer comfort
  . If you like to deal with high-level companies and they can help you solve all the problems, UNIX is the best choice. All vendors provide standard 24x7 service contracts for hardware and operating systems. Because the vendor supports hardware and operating systems, if something goes wrong, someone will always be able to solve the problem.
• Security
  . UNIX is currently one of the safest operating systems.
• Portability
  . UNIX can run on many different platforms. Despite the hassle of moving to Unix of different styles, it mainly depends on the hardware manufacturer's decision on how to modify their UNIX styles, which has little to do with Unix itself.
• Reliability
  . UNIX is an extremely mature system, which is not as fragile as other commercial operating systems such as Windows. Despite the increasing maturity of Linux, Unix has a history of nearly 20 years.
• Hardware
  . UNIX systems can run on very high-end powerful hardware, such as the IBM power platform. Performance is superior to any other platform.

 

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Trend and market share

International Data Corporation (IDC) reported in February 2009 that:

• The Unix Market saw a strong growth, with revenue growth of 30.4% per quarter (between $37.41 and $4.877 billion) and installation growth of 8.3% (between 114,845 and 124,346 ).
• In the last quarter, Unix was the most profitable operating system, pushing windows to the second place. In addition, There Was A 32.7% increase in revenue and a 15.3% increase in the number of installations in the front-end processor's Proteus system.

2009
The report for April is clearer. According to the IDC study on the Unix Market, Unix's revenue in 2008 was $69 billion, estimated to reach 2013.
The Annual Meeting reached $74 billion. The same IDC Report also predicts that Linux-related software revenues from 2008 to 2013 will grow from $12 billion
$35 billion. In addition, according to IDC statistics, Unix accounted for 36% of the total server market revenue in the fourth quarter of last year.

There is no doubt that the Unix market is booming. What about Aix?

Figure
1 shows the growth in Aix revenue over the past few years. According to the IDC Report at the end of 2008, IBM sold $6.4 billion worth of Unix servers last year, occupying
37.2% of the market share; Sun's sales amounted to $4.8 billion, accounting for 28.1% of the market share. The third place is Hewlett-Packard. The sales volume is
$4.6 billion, accounting for 26.5% of the shares. This trend has been stable since 2005. Gartner and IDC both think IBM is UNIX
A leader in the market.

Figure 1. Market Situation of Aix and Power Systems

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History of Aix

AIX
Advanced Interactive executive is a UNIX operating system developed by IBM. AIX at 1986
First introduced in the year. IBM migrated Aix to the RS/1989 platform in 6000. AIX version 3 and the first batch of RS/6000
Models are released at the same time. The integer computing performance of these systems is superior to that of all other machines, and the floating point computing performance is improved by 10 times.

Version 4
Introduced in 1994, it added Symmetric Multi-processing (SMP) Support for the first batch of RS/6000 SMP servers. This operating system has been developing to AIx in 1999.
4.3.3 introduction of workload management (WLM ). In May 2001, IBM released AIX 5l, and l Represents "Linux
Affinity "; power4 servers are also released, which provide the server logic partition function. IBM
The first mid-range system hypervisor is created for this combination. These advances have made IBM a breakthrough to challenge both HP and sun. In just a few years, IBM
Has a dominant position in the market. In October 2002, IBM released dynamic logical partitions (dlpar) and AIX 5.2. AIX released in August 2004
5.3 provides many new features: virtualization, security, reliability, and system management. More importantly, AIX 5.3 fully supports advanced power architecture
Power virtualization alization (APV) functions; this includes the differential zone, virtual I/O server, and symmetric multithreading (SMT ).

IBM
AIX November 2007 was released in 6.1. The major improvements in this version include similar workload partitions (wpar) and
Live application mobility is not available in Solaris, and partitions can be transferred without stopping the application. AIX
Is the first operating system to introduce a Log File System (JFS), which can avoid executing a file system check (fsck) on the disk during reboot, thus speeding up the boot speed. AIX
There is also a built-in logical volume manager (LVM) (as early as 1990
), Which helps partition and manage the disk group. Another important innovation is shared libraries, which can prevent applications from statically linking to databases. Therefore, less binary code is used and
Less hardware Ram and less disk space required for installation.

AIX is the first unix03 compliant with the Open Group
The standard 64-bit UNIX operating system is also the first operating system that supports the Unix 1998 standard. Since January 1, 1997, AIX also supports TCP/IP
V6, and received the "ready for IPv6" certification in 2006.

Figure 2 shows the development experience of Aix.

Figure 2. Development of Aix

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Power systems and Aix-uncertain UNIX market leader in 2010

2006
In January, AIX celebrated its 20th anniversary, with bright prospects for the UNIX field. Ibm aix is the only one that has continuously increased its market share over the years.
In UNIX format, IBM will continue to occupy the main share of the UNIX server market. At present, the growth in the Unix Market mainly comes from IBM. AIX has benefited from
The power platform provides many hardware innovations and will make more improvements in the future. It also benefited from the virtualization engine powervm.

Advantages of Aix: performance, innovation, virtualization, availability and consistent development path

The last survey on Operating System Reliability sent a questionnaire to users in 27 countries, the survey shows that ibm aix is ahead of all server operating systems in terms of downtime-only about 30 minutes of downtime per year. This is mainly due to the nearly continuous availability of Aix.

In
In the early 1990s s, there were five different server architectures with fierce competition. IBM and apple and Motorola
A universal architecture meeting Alliance standards (a high-performance architecture with
History, 2006 ). Its first design is very simple, and all commands are completed within one clock cycle. It lacks the floating point and parallel processing functions. Power
The architecture tries to make up for this defect. It contains more than 100 types of commands, known as the complex RISC system. Power1 chip from 800,000
Transistor, partitioned by function. It has a separate floating-point register that can be extended from low-end workstation to high-end workstation. The first chip actually has several chips on a single motherboard, but is optimized to include more
It is a 1 million-bit transistor. The Mars explorer project uses it as the CPU. Although there were many other designs in 1990s, IBM did lag behind HP, sun
And other vendors, the Unix Market in 1990s was in a fight situation.

Over the years, IBM has been improving IBM's proprietary server-based hardware, using new architectures that actually require some mainframe components. HMC (Hardware Management Console) and system management programs (software for running and managing one or more operating systems on hardware machines) are important parts of the power architecture.

The power5 architecture introduced in 2003 contains 0.276 billion transistors on each processor. It is based on the 130 nano-copper/SOI process and advanced chip multi-processing, with larger cache, on-chip memory controller, parallel multithreading (SMT), advanced power management and improved system management program technology.

2007
In June, The power6 was launched with approximately 0.79 billion transistors. It adopts a dual-core design with a frequency of 4.7
GHz. Although the performance has doubled, innovations in power supply and cooling have made it equivalent to power5. Power6
Provides hardware support for decimal calculation. It also integrates decimal floating point units in the chip for the first time. There are also several important powervm virtualization improvements released together with power6, including
Live partition mobility, decimal floating point, and dynamic energy
Management. Power6 5.00 GHz processor-based power 595 is currently the fastest Unix server system. 64
The number of core servers is only half of the 128-core HP integrity Superdome, but the performance is better. 595 of performance reaches 256 cores sun
The number of CPU cores is only 90% of the number of CPU cores of the iSCSI enterprise m9000.

Power
The system is based on reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features from the mainframe, such as first failure data capture. Based on power6
The processor server further extends these features, including processor instruction retry, alternate Processor
Recovery, partition availability priority, live application mobility and
Live Partition
Mobility. These features help eliminate system-related planned and unplanned downtime. If you need to stop the system for reconfiguration, firmware update, or other reasons, you can transfer the application to another
The server does not have any impact on production and operation. There is no need to reboot, no need to restart, the service will not be interrupted, and the service is continuously available to users.

AIX
How can we use hardware functions to prevent downtime? One example is the storage key. This new feature utilizes power6
Hardware further isolates kernel and application data. It prevents invalid memory modification due to programming errors. Allow applications to use power6 In the AIX 5.3 and Aix kernels
Storage key. In Aix 6.1, the AIX kernel is allowed to use the power6 key.

IBM provides the best mid-range virtualization Products
Powervm. Recent improvements include live Application
Mobility (you can transfer an application to another working partition without stopping the service), active memory sharing, and multiple shared processor pools. Others
UNIX vendors cannot provide these virtualization features. IBM has 40 years of virtualization development experience (powervm is from the mainframe/system Z
Virtualization is developed.

AIX runs only on IBM power systems, which are the most powerful mid-range Unix
Server. IBM believes that running AIX only on power is an advantage because it is fully optimized for this architecture and has a clear development path, IBM
Will develop it. AIX has always integrated the logical volume manager, while other UNIX-style systems require additional products.

 

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Conclusion

AIX
It is the only UNIX style that has continued to increase market share for years, partly because it leverages powerful Power
The hardware maintains a leading edge in reliability, availability, and scalability. Obviously, IBM is ahead in UNIX innovation. Undoubtedly, in the future Unix Market, Aix
It will still be a mainstream product with bright prospects.

 

References

Learning

• AIX and Unix Zone
  : The "Aix and Unix zone" on developerworks provides a wealth of information related to all aspects of Aix system management that you can use to extend your UNIX skills.
• Getting started with AIX and Unix
  : Visit the "Aix AIX" page to learn more about AIX and UNIX.
• Summary of Aix and Unix topics
  : The AIX and Unix area has already introduced many technical topics for you and summarized many popular knowledge points. We will continue to launch many related hot topics later. To facilitate your access, we will summarize all the topics in this area here, it makes it easier for you to find the content you need.
• Technical bookstore
  : Browse books on these and other technical topics in the technical bookstore.
• UNIX Network Performance Analysis
  This article describes how to quickly find and identify performance problems and how to solve them.
• Preparing to take the IBM certification test 234: AIx 5l performance and systems Tuning
  .
• Read Power Architecture:
  High-performance architecture with a history
  .
• Read power
  To the People: A History of chip making at IBM
  To understand IBM's power architecture.
• IBM Redbook AIX 5l
  Practical Performance Tools and tuning Guide
  Fully describes the performance monitoring and tuning tools provided by AIX 5l Version 5.3.
• Operating System and device management provided by IBM to users and System Administrators
  Includes complete system management and device management information, which helps you select appropriate options when performing various tasks, such as system backup and recovery, management of physical and logical storage, and adjustment of paging space.
• The
  AIX 5l differences guide version 5.3 Edition
  Redbook focuses on the differences between AIX 5l Version 5.3 and Aix 5l version 5.2.
• Http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cn/aix/library/au-linuxtogether/
  Explains how to make traditional UNIX distributions work with Linux.
• AIX Wiki
  It is a collaborative environment that provides Aix-related technical information.
• Database Performance Tuning
  On Aix
  : This Redbook helps system designers, system administrators, and database administrators design, plan, implement, maintain, monitor, and adjust Relational Database Management System (rdmbs ), so as to achieve optimal performance on Aix.

Discussion

• Developerworks blog
  : Read our blog and join the developerworks community
  .
• Read developerworks on Twitter
  .
• Join my developerworks community
  .
• Participate in Aix and Unix forums:
  • AIX Forum
  • Aix for developers Forum
  • Cluster System Management
  • IBM
    Support Assistant Forum
  • Performance Tools Forum
  • Virtualization Forum
  • More AIX and Unix forums

 

About the author

		Ken Milberg is PMP and a writer/SITE Expert at techtarget.com. He also provides Linux technical information and support. Ken is a writer and technical editor of IBM systems magazine and open edition. Ken owns Bachelor's degree in Computer and Information Science and master's degree in technology management science at the University of Maryland University College. He is Founder and owner of the Long Island POWER-AIX user group. Over the years, he has worked in companies of all sizes and has held various positions, including CIOs. And senior AIX engineers. He is now working at future tech, an IBM Business Partner headquartered in Long Island. Ken is not only passed through PMI Certified project management professionals (PMP) are also senior technical experts (Cate, IBM System P5 2006) certified by IBM ).