Run AIX 7.2 on x86 with QEMU

AIX is the UNIX proprietary Operating System (OS) of IBM and unless you have access to IBM expensive machines (Power Series), you won’t have a chance of using or trying the IBM powerful OS.

Nowadays, we virtualize or containerize almost everything on our personal machines or laptops. However, the virtualization is only possible when the processor architecture of the host (your PC) and the guest (the Virtual Machine or VM) is the same.

I have a common Intel (x86) laptop running linux (of course). And I want to run AIX on top of it. AIX is an OS solely purposed for PPC (PowerPC) architecture. Therefore, I knew from inception that there won’t be any virtualization solution for this, but in theory it might be possible to achieve my goal through emulation.

I decided to try it with the best emulator ever: QEMU. I would be forever grateful to Fabrice Bellard, the French brilliant hacker who built this opensource tool that is literally the Swiss Army knife of emulation.

1 – Prerequisites

• Be Patient during the whole process !!!
  the following procedures can take several minutes or hours and you are likely to start over at many times, so the key word here is: Patience.

• Download and compile a recent version of Qemu

wget https://download.qemu.org/qemu-5.1.0.tar.xz
tar xvJf qemu-5.1.0.tar.xz
cd qemu-5.1.0
./configure
make

It will take some time …

• Obtain AIX 7.2 installation media
  Download AIX DVD iso from IBM ESS (Entitlement System Support):
  https://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/ess/index.wss
  You can create a free account on IBM but you may have to provide details on an existing serial number and Power Series machine model prior to downloading.
  Save the iso file with an adequate name, for e.g. AIX72.iso

2 – Creation of the hard drive of our VM

Create an empty virtual disk:
(in my case I created a folder aixVM where I am creating the disk and dropping the ISO file)

qemu-img create -f  qcow2  hdisk0.qcow2  20G

3 – Creation of the AIX VM

Define the VM with the below parameters:
cpu = 1 (it can support many cores via the smp parameter as well)
memory = 4G (you can set it to 2G as well)
boot from the CDROM (the AIX 7.2 iso file)

qemu-system-ppc64 -cpu POWER8 \
-machine pseries -m 4096 -serial stdio \
-drive file=hdisk0.qcow2,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi \
-device scsi-hd,drive=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-cdrom AIX72.iso \
-prom-env "boot-command=boot cdrom:" \
-prom-env "input-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000" \
-prom-env "output-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000"

Take a long coffee break here …

4 – Boot from the disk

The installation from the CDROM is likely to enter an infinite loop. You’ll notice it by observing the VM monitor. If that’s the case, interrupt the process with CTRL-C.
Then, launch the same command with the disk as boot device instead of the CDrom:

qemu-system-ppc64 -cpu POWER8 \
-machine pseries -m 4096 -serial stdio \
-drive file=hdisk0.qcow2,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi \
-device scsi-hd,drive=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-cdrom AIX72.iso \
-prom-env "boot-command=boot disk:" \
-prom-env "input-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000" \
-prom-env "output-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000"

At this stage after a successful load of the OS kernel, the process may hang after the activation of the swap partition, like in the below screenshot:

To solve the problem we need to restart the process by setting the verbose flag as in the command below:

qemu-system-ppc64 -cpu POWER8 \
-machine pseries -m 4096 -serial stdio \
-drive file=hdisk0.qcow2,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi \
-device scsi-hd,drive=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-cdrom AIX72.iso \
-prom-env "boot-command=boot disk: -s verbose" \
-prom-env "input-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000" \
-prom-env "output-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000"

It appears the fsck64 program is the one crashing.

5 – Solve the fsck64 issue

• Boot from the CDrom and go into the Maintenance Mode:

• Go to /sbin/helpers/jfs2 and empty the file fsck64 :

cd /sbin/helpers/jfs2
> fsck64

• Edit the fsck64 file with the following lines:
  #!/bin/ksh
  exit 0
• Save and quit the file.

• Sync the changes to the disk and shutdown the VM

6 – Boot from the disk drive and access the system

qemu-system-ppc64 -cpu POWER8 \
-machine pseries -m 4096 -serial stdio \
-drive file=hdisk0.qcow2,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi \
-device scsi-hd,drive=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-cdrom AIX72.iso \
-prom-env "boot-command=boot disk:" \
-prom-env "input-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000" \
-prom-env "output-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000"

Accept the license agreements, change the root password and this time, you should get (finally) the AIX console login prompt.

7 – Post installation tasks : Services, SSH & Network setup

Some default services are not necessarily needed and should be disabled to enable a faster boot of the VM.
You’ll also notice that the VM CPU is almost at 100% utilization; this is also due to some of those services.

rmitab cron
rmitab clcomd
rmitab naudio2
rmitab pfcdaemon
stopsrc -s clcomd
stopsrc -s pfcdaemon

• Install OpenSSH

Mount the CDROM, copy the required filesets and install:

mount  -v  cdrfs  -o  ro  /dev/cd0  /mnt
mkdir   /tmp/ssh_install
cd  /mnt/installp/ppc
cp  openssh*  /tmp/ssh_install
cd  /tmp/ssh_install
installp -acgXYd . openssh.base openssh.license openssh.man.en_US openssh.msg.en_US

Check if sshd is up and running:

lssrc  -s  sshd

• Network Setup
  The network activation is a very important piece as you would have noticed that every time we CTRL-C our VM, it shuts it down.
  To setup the VM, we are going to use another magic possibility of QEMU:
  use of a tap device to emulate network bridge.

1 – Add a new tap device in your Linux Host machine

ip tuntap add dev tap0 mode tap

2 – Enable proxy_arp on both devices (the tap device and your LAN/WLAN interface)

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/tap0/proxy_arp
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/wlp0s20f3/proxy_arp

3 – Setup IP settings for the tap device
(My WLAN IP is 192.168.100.4 and I want to give 192.168.100.151 to the AIX VM)

ip addr add 192.168.100.4 dev tap0
ip link set up tap0
ip link set up dev tap0 promisc on
ip route add 192.168.100.151 dev tap0
arp -Ds 192.168.100.151 wlp0s20f3 pub

4 – Restart the AIX VM with the NIC interface defined as tap0

qemu-system-ppc64 -cpu POWER8 \
-machine pseries -m 4096 -serial stdio \
-drive file=hdisk0.qcow2,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi \
-device scsi-hd,drive=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-cdrom AIX72.iso \
-net nic -net tap,script=no,ifname=tap0
-prom-env "boot-command=boot disk:" \
-prom-env "input-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000" \
-prom-env "output-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000"

5 – Assign the IP address to the network interface inside the AIX VM

chdev -l en0 -a netaddr=192.168.100.151 -a netmask=255.255.255.0 -a state=up

8 – Final step

Now with SSH active and Network working, we can run our so long QEMU command line in the background !

qemu-system-ppc64 -cpu POWER8 \
-machine pseries -m 4096 \
-drive file=hdisk0.qcow2,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi \
-device scsi-hd,drive=drive-virtio-disk0 \
-cdrom AIX72.iso \
-net nic -net tap,script=no,ifname=tap0
-prom-env "boot-command=boot disk:" \
-prom-env "input-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000" \
-prom-env "output-device=/vdevice/vty@71000000" \
--daemonize

Wait for the VM to boot up completely and you can enjoy: now you have the best operating system running on your laptop !!