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IBM System p5 550 and 550Q Technical Overview and Introduction

2.14.1 AIX 5L

If you are installing AIX 5L on the p5-550 or p5-550Q, the following minimum requirements
must be met:

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AIX 5L for POWER V5.2 with 5200-09 Technology Level (APAR IY82425) or later

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AIX 5L for POWER V5.3 with 5300-05 Technology Level (APAR IY82426) or later

IBM periodically releases maintenance packages for the AIX 5L operating system. These
packages are available on CD-ROM, or you can download them from the Internet at:

http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/support/unixservers/aixfixes.html

The Web page provides information about how to obtain the CD-ROM.

You can also get individual operating system fixes and information about obtaining AIX 5L
service at this site. In AIX 5L V5.3, the

suma

command is also available, which helps the

administrator to automate the task of checking and downloading operating system
downloads. For more information about the

suma

command, refer to:

http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/suma/home.html

Electronic Software Delivery (ESD) is available for AIX 5L V5.2 and V5.3 for and
POWER5 based systems. ESD is a way for clients to receive software and associated
publications online, as opposed to waiting for a physical shipment to arrive. Clients requesting
ESD should order FC 3450.

ESD has the following requirements:

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or POWER5 system

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Internet connectivity from a POWER5 system or PC, and a reasonable connection speed
for downloading large products, such as AIX 5L

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Registration on the ESD Web site

For additional information, contact your IBM sales representative.

Software support for new features in processor

For a complete list of new features introduced in the processor, see 2.1, “The
processor” on page 26. Support for two new virtual memory page sizes was
introduced: 64 KB and 16 GB, as well as support for 1 TB segment size. While 16 GB pages
are intended to only be used in very high performance environments, 64 KB pages are
general-purpose. AIX 5L Version 5.3 with the 5300-04 Technology Level 64-bit kernel is
required for 64 KB and 16 GB page size support.

As with all previous versions of AIX, 4 KB is the default page size. A process continues to use
4 KB pages unless a user specifically requests that another page size be used. AIX 5L has
rich support of 64 KB pages. They are easy to use, and it is expected that many applications
will see performance benefits when using 64 KB pages rather than 4 KB pages. No system
configuration changes are necessary to enable a system to use 64 KB pages; they are fully
pageable, and the size of the pool of 64 KB page frames on a system is dynamic and fully
managed by AIX 5L.

The main benefit of a larger page size is improved performance for applications that allocate
and repeatedly access large amounts of memory. The performance improvement from larger

Note: The Advanced POWER Virtualization feature (FC 7941) is not supported on AIX 5L
V5.2. It requires AIX 5L V5.3.