The rest of their organization needs to follow along, if this is to succeed

Posted Sep 20, 2013 23:26 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: The rest of their organization needs to follow along, if this is to succeed by tarvin
Parent article: IBM Announces $1 Billion Linux Investment for Power Systems

I've done a fair amount of work on IBM Power systems and I'll bet I can explain why IBM Support dragged its feet until you could demonstrate a problem on AIX: IBM has lots more tools available to diagnose the problem when AIX is involved. IBM develops the hardware and AIX in tandem; there are numerous facilities built into AIX and AIX applications that can be used to diagnose and repair hardware (in your case, virtual hardware). There's the AIX error log, which contains messages from the hardware's self-diagnostics that direct IBM Support's procedures. There's the AIX application that runs hardware tests. There's the command from the hardware console that disconnects a device, including getting AIX to quiesce its use of it first.

The announcement doesn't say any of this billion dollar investment will be used to improve Linux on Power, but if it is, it IBM might be able to bring some of this stuff to parity with AIX. But it won't be easy, because getting the open source community to distribute something for you is a lot harder than just putting it into your own code library. Just ask Android developers.