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> The only still living variant is AIX.

This is incorrect.

The thing you have to understand about “AIX” is that historically it was not a single codebase, it was just a common brand for multiple unrelated IBM Unix offerings. (DB2 is the same story.) One of those offerings was AIX/ESA for IBM mainframes - and that was indeed based on the OSF/1 microkernel. But AIX/ESA died in the early 1990s-it was replaced by turning MVS aka OS/390 into a certified Unix, a role carried on by z/OS today, and later on by z/Linux as well. Whereas, the only AIX that survives to this day is the RS/6000 branch which isn’t based on OSF/1, and has a classic monolithic kernel design. Its distant ancestor, AIX version 1 for the RT PC, did use a microkernel (VRM), but that microkernel was very different from Mach and OSF/1 (it was written in a PL/I dialect, PL.8, that’s how alien it was)



Additionally it is the only UNIX that follows a Windows like approach to shared libraries, which might confuse folks coming from POSIX land.


What specifically makes AIX's approach to shared libraries "Windows like"?



Thanks for the clarification.




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