Chapter 5. Porting AIX Applications

In this chapter

5.1	Preliminary Tasks	page 204
5.2	General Differences	page 206
5.3	Compilers	page 210
5.4	Make	page 228
5.5	Linker	page 229
5.6	AIX Versus Linux Shared Library Creation	page 233
5.7	Dynamic Loading	page 233
5.8	Template Instantiation Differences Between AIX and Linux	page 235
5.9	C++filt Utility	page 239
5.10	System APIs: AIX/Linux	page 240
5.11	Selected AIX/Linux System API Comparisons	page 248
5.12	Some AIX Nonstandard Programming Practices	page 314
5.13	Signals	page 314
5.14	Network Programming	page 323
5.15	Interprocess Communications	page 324
5.16	POSIX Threads	page 332
5.17	Large Page Support	page 339
5.18	Common APIs	page 340
5.19	Summary	page 341

Porting is the step of the process during which modifications to the application take place. At this point, most if not all technical aspects and dependencies of the application should have already been uncovered during the scoping and analysis steps. The only thing that needs to be done now is to modify the source code so that it compiles and runs on the Linux platform.

During the porting process, software developers and porting personnel will likely encounter several differences between the UNIX operating system they are used to and the Linux 2.6 platform. For each topic discussed in this chapter, the most common differences are presented to explain what works and what does not work on the Linux 2.6 environment. The AIX environment described in this chapter is based mostly on version 5L but should also be applicable to older versions of AIX. Although this chapter discusses AIX topics in some detail, it is assumed that porting engineers reading the chapter already have software development experience on AIX.