[TUHS] two AIX items [was Re: History of symbol preemption

Kevin Bowling kevin.bowling at kev009.com
Wed Jan 15 09:22:38 AEST 2020


I've got a bunch of paper AIX internals documentation outside the
usual, most interesting from memory is one describing the 4.1 work
where it gained SMP support, pthreads, and a bunch of other things.  I
need to get some kind of scanning setup if you are interested.

On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 12:29 PM Charles H Sauer
<sauer at technologists.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 1/13/2020 1:58 PM, Paul Winalski wrote:
>
> > ...  LInux, AIX and probably other implementations of ELF have a
> > feature in the runtime loader called symbol preemption.  When loading
>
> As far as I know, AIX has never used ELF.
>
> On the RT, AIX 1 & 2 used a.out enhanced for basic shared library
> support, designed by Larry Loucks with help from ISC, probably John
> Levine, if I recall correctly.
>
> Starting with AIX 3, AIX used an extended COFF. See Auslander et al,
> "Dynamic Linking and Loading in the AIX System", SA23-2619 RISC
> System/6000 Technology p. 151. (I don't have/know of PDF of SA23-2619.)
> See, also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCOFF.
>
> It seems likely that AIX XCOFF supported symbol preemption, I haven't
> tried to determine one way or the other.
>
> AIX on 386 & 370 probably used a.out. Clem probably knows.
>
> An IBM retirees group on Facebook led me to IBM AIX Enhancements and
> Modernization at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248453.html,
> just available yesterday. I tend to think of AIX as abandoned by IBM in
> favor of Linux, but, of course, that isn't really true. I've downloaded
> the PDF, but not looked inside.
>
> Charlie
>
> --
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