AIX 5L V5.3 Gets Unix 03 Certification

Published: December 7, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server and operating system maker IBM has announced that its latest iteration of the AIX operating system, AIX 5L V5.3, has been certified as conforming to the Unix 03 standard from The Open Group. That organization is, of course, the home of the Unix standard, and it is also the body that along with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) controls the POSIX interface standards that are common in Unix and other operating systems.

Long before the commercial computing world was aware of open source operating systems, there were so-called open systems operating systems. Open source means just what you think it does: anyone can see the source code for the operating system, and depending on the licenses, make changes to the code. With open systems, there is no stipulation that code be open source, but the code does have to adhere to an open set of specifications that allow for application code that rides atop of that operating system to move more easily from platform to platform.

The standards bodies like The Open Group like to talk precisely about their standards and where they come from. In this case, the Unix 03 standard is developed by The Open Group's Platform Forum, which is responsible for creating what is called the Single Unix Specification Version 3 as well as aligning and policing the POSIX (short for Portable Operating System Interface) standard that is complementary to the Unix standard. As such, The Open Group is involved in the development of various Unixes, such as IBM's AIX and Sun Microsystems' Solaris as well as the open source BSD and Linux operating systems, which support POSIX and are for all practical purposes Unix-alike platforms. The companies that participate in The Open Group create the Unix and POSIX standards, extensions to Unix for high performance computing and other areas, and then implement testing programs that can certify compliance of an operating system to these standards.

Back in the day when Unixes were not as standard as they are today, such standards were so important that companies went to war over them. (I will spare you the long history of the Unix Wars from the 1980s and 1990s.) Adhering to such standards is the normal practice for some vendors--IBM, Sun, and Fujitsu-Siemens are keen on the Unix 03 standard, while Hewlett-Packard has not been involved in the standards in recent years with its HP-UX platform.

IBM was the first vendor to get Unix 03 certification, back in August 2004 with AIX 5L V5.2. Sun certified Solaris 10 for its 32-bit and 64-bit Sparc platforms as well as on 32-bit X86 machines shortly thereafter, in December 2004. In April 2005, Sun put out a patched version of Solaris 10 that certified to the Unix 03 spec on 64-bit X64 machines. In March 2006, Fujitsu-Siemens had Solaris 10 certified to the Unix 03 spec on its own 64-bit Sparc64 platforms.

Like other Unix operating system vendors, IBM has supported the prior Unix 95 and Unix 98 standards, and according Jay Kruemcke, program director for AIX marketing, Big Blue is working with The Open Group on establishing the future Unix 07 standard specification, which is expected next year. And, IBM is hoping to use the Unix standards as a lever against HP, which supported Unix 95 with its HP-UX Unix variant, but not Unix 98 or Unix 03. Digital Unix, once known as Tru64 after Digital was acquired by Compaq and now mothballed by HP, was certified at the Unix 98 spec level.

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