Hello fellow NetDatars,
I have found Issue #3257 which is almost 3 years old and I am wondering if there are any news in regards to this.
Maybe someone has implemented something or maybe AIX is already supported although not mentioned.
If someone from the team, developers, etc. has more information I am all ears. I would very much like to see it happening…
Kind regards
As far as just supporting running on POWER hardware, that should be a non-issue (none of the core code does anything CPU-specific) even though it’s not well tested.
AIX, on the other hand, is not really supported right now. I believe all of our dependencies work correctly on AIX, and that we don’t do anything that would break because of different runtime semantics on AIX, but we don’t have any dedicated data collection code for it either, so usability would likely be rather limited. I don’t think there are any plans right now for us to officially work on it due to both the relatively low market share (AIX is one of the few commercial UNIX systems that still has relevant market share, but it’s still trivially beat by macOS, FreeBSD, and of course, Linux) and a general lack of availability of AIX systems for us to test on.
However, if someone from the community wants to step up and contribute code for this, we’ll be happy to review it and probably end up merging it, though due to the aforementioned testability issues we probably won’t be able to guarantee a level of reliability equivalent to our Linux support.
On a side note, I’ve been pushing to potentially add POWER8+ support in our Docker images, static builds, and some native binary packages, though that may still be a ways off and won’t really help with support for AIX specifically.
Hi @Austin_Hemmelgarn ,
thanks for the feedback. For the moment I have access to AIX systems and could potentially be able to help with that but I would like a pointer on where to start of.
Should I start by trying to compile the source code on an AIX system and see where I can get it from there?
That’s probably the most practical starting point. First step would be just the generic autoreconf -ivf && ./configure && make approach, but for it to be mergeable netdata-installer.sh would have to work correctly (and ideally also packaging/installer/install-required-packages.sh needs updated to pull in dependencies through whatever packaging system AIX uses).
Also, the POWER8+ aspect does work (I’ve now tested this), the only issue there is a lack of support for the FreeIPMI plugin (FreeIPMI itself does not seem to want to build on POWER8).