Re: AIX support - alignment issues

On Sun, Jul 3, 2022 at 8:34 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> I am a little concerned though that we don't have access to the latest
> version of AIX --- that seems like a non-maintainable situation.

The release history doesn't look toooo bad on that front: the live
versions are 7.1 (2010-2023), 7.2 (2015-TBA) and 7.3 (2021-TBA).  7.3
only came out half a year ago, slightly after Windows 11, which we
aren't testing yet either.  Those GCC AIX systems seem to be provided
by IBM and the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University which has a
POWER lab providing ongoing CI services etc to various OSS projects,
so I would assume that upgrades (and retirement of the
about-to-be-desupported 7.1 system) will come along eventually.

I don't have a dog in this race, but AIX is clearly not in the same
category as HP-UX (and maybe Solaris is somewhere in between).  AIX
runs on hardware you can buy today that got a major refresh last year
(Power 10), while HP-UX runs only on discontinued CPUs, so while it's
a no-brainer to drop HP-UX support, it's a trickier question for AIX.
I guess the way open source is supposed to work is that someone with a
real interest in PostgreSQL on AIX helps maintain it, not only keeping
it building and passing tests, but making it work really well (cf huge
pages, scalable event handling, probably more things that would be
obvious to an AIX expert...), and representing ongoing demand and
interests from the AIX user community...