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PERLAIX(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLAIX(1)

NAME
README.aix - Perl version 5 on IBM Unix (AIX) systems

DESCRIPTION
This document describes various features of IBM's Unix
operating system (AIX) that will affect how Perl version 5
(hereafter just Perl) is compiled and/or runs.

Compiling Perl 5 on AIX

When compiling Perl, you must use an ANSI C compiler. AIX
does not ship an ANSI compliant C-compiler with AIX by
default, but binary builds of gcc for AIX are widely
available.

At the moment of writing, AIX supports two different
native C compilers, for which you have to pay: xlC and
vac. If you decide to use either of these two (which is
quite a lot easier than using gcc), be sure to upgrade to
the latest available patch level. Currently:

xlC.C 3.1.4.10 or 3.6.6.0 or 4.0.2.2 or 5.0.2.9 or 6.0.0.3
vac.C 4.4.0.3 or 5.0.2.6 or 6.0.0.1

note that xlC has the OS version in the name as of version
4.0.2.0, so you will find xlC.C for AIX-5.0 as package

xlC.aix50.rte 5.0.2.0 or 6.0.0.3

subversions are not the same "latest" on all OS versions.
For example, the latest xlC-5 on aix41 is 5.0.2.9, while
on aix43, it is 5.0.2.7.

Perl can be compiled with either IBM's ANSI C compiler or
with gcc. The former is recommended, as not only can it
compile Perl with no difficulty, but also can take advan-
tage of features listed later that require the use of IBM
compiler-specific command-line flags.

The IBM's compiler patch levels 5.0.0.0 and 5.0.1.0 have
compiler optimization bugs that affect compiling perl.c
and regcomp.c, respectively. If Perl's configuration
detects those compiler patch levels, optimization is
turned off for the said source code files. Upgrading to
at least 5.0.2.0 is recommended.

If you decide to use gcc, make sure your installation is
recent and complete, and be sure to read the Perl README
file for more gcc-specific details. Please report any
hoops you had to jump through to the development team.

OS level

Before installing the patches to the IBM C-compiler you
need to know the level of patching for the Operating Sys-
tem. IBM's command 'oslevel' will show the base, but is
not always complete (in this example oslevel shows
4.3.NULL, whereas the system might run most of 4.3.THREE):

# oslevel
4.3.0.0
# lslpp -l | grep 'bos.rte '
bos.rte 4.3.3.75 COMMITTED Base Operating System Runtime
bos.rte 4.3.2.0 COMMITTED Base Operating System Runtime
#

The same might happen to AIX 5.1 or other OS levels. As a
side note, perl cannot be built without bos.adt.syscalls
and bos.adt.libm installed

# lslpp -l | egrep "syscalls|libm"
bos.adt.libm 5.1.0.25 COMMITTED Base Application Development
bos.adt.syscalls 5.1.0.36 COMMITTED System Calls Application
#

Building Dynamic Extensions on AIX

AIX supports dynamically loadable objects as well as
shared libraries. Shared libraries by convention end with
the suffix .a, which is a bit misleading, as an archive
can contain static as well as dynamic members. For perl
dynamically loaded objects we use the .so suffix also used
on many other platforms.

Note that starting from Perl 5.7.2 (and consequently
5.8.0) and AIX 4.3 or newer Perl uses the AIX native
dynamic loading interface in the so called runtime linking
mode instead of the emulated interface that was used in
Perl releases 5.6.1 and earlier or, for AIX releases 4.2
and earlier. This change does break backward compatibil-
ity with compiled modules from earlier perl releases. The
change was made to make Perl more compliant with other
applications like Apache/mod_perl which are using the AIX
native interface. This change also enables the use of C++
code with static constructors and destructors in perl
extensions, which was not possible using the emulated
interface.

The IBM ANSI C Compiler

All defaults for Configure can be used.

If you've chosen to use vac 4, be sure to run 4.4.0.3.
Older versions will turn up nasty later on. For vac 5 be
sure to run at least 5.0.1.0, but vac 5.0.2.6 or up is
highly recommended. Note that since IBM has removed vac
5.0.2.1 through 5.0.2.5 from the software depot, these
versions should be considered obsolete.

Here's a brief lead of how to upgrade the compiler to the
latest level. Of course this is subject to changes. You
can only upgrade versions from ftp-available updates if
the first three digit groups are the same (in where you
can skip intermediate unlike the patches in the developer
snapshots of perl), or to one version up where the "base"
is available. In other words, the AIX compiler patches
are cumulative.

vac.C.4.4.0.1 => vac.C.4.4.0.3 is OK (vac.C.4.4.0.2 not needed)
xlC.C.3.1.3.3 => xlC.C.3.1.4.10 is NOT OK (xlC.C.3.1.4.0 is not available)

# ftp ftp.software.ibm.com
Connected to service.boulder.ibm.com.
: welcome message ...
Name (ftp.software.ibm.com:merijn): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password.
Password:
... accepted login stuff
ftp> cd /aix/fixes/v4/
ftp> dir other other.ll
output to local-file: other.ll? y
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
226 Transfer complete.
ftp> dir xlc xlc.ll
output to local-file: xlc.ll? y
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
226 Transfer complete.
ftp> bye
... goodbye messages
# ls -l *.ll
-rw-rw-rw- 1 merijn system 1169432 Nov 2 17:29 other.ll
-rw-rw-rw- 1 merijn system 29170 Nov 2 17:29 xlc.ll

On AIX 4.2 using xlC, we continue:

# lslpp -l | fgrep 'xlC.C '
xlC.C 3.1.4.9 COMMITTED C for AIX Compiler
xlC.C 3.1.4.0 COMMITTED C for AIX Compiler
# grep 'xlC.C.3.1.4.*.bff' xlc.ll
-rw-r--r-- 1 45776101 1 6286336 Jul 22 1996 xlC.C.3.1.4.1.bff
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 6173696 Aug 24 1998 xlC.C.3.1.4.10.bff
-rw-r--r-- 1 45776101 1 6319104 Aug 14 1996 xlC.C.3.1.4.2.bff
-rw-r--r-- 1 45776101 1 6316032 Oct 21 1996 xlC.C.3.1.4.3.bff
-rw-r--r-- 1 45776101 1 6315008 Dec 20 1996 xlC.C.3.1.4.4.bff
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 6178816 Mar 28 1997 xlC.C.3.1.4.5.bff
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 6188032 May 22 1997 xlC.C.3.1.4.6.bff
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 6191104 Sep 5 1997 xlC.C.3.1.4.7.bff
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 6185984 Jan 13 1998 xlC.C.3.1.4.8.bff
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 6169600 May 27 1998 xlC.C.3.1.4.9.bff
# wget ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/fixes/v4/xlc/xlC.C.3.1.4.10.bff
#

On AIX 4.3 using vac, we continue:

# lslpp -l | grep 'vac.C '
vac.C 5.0.2.2 COMMITTED C for AIX Compiler
vac.C 5.0.2.0 COMMITTED C for AIX Compiler
# grep 'vac.C.5.0.2.*.bff' other.ll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 13592576 Apr 16 2001 vac.C.5.0.2.0.bff
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 14133248 Apr 9 2002 vac.C.5.0.2.3.bff
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 14173184 May 20 2002 vac.C.5.0.2.4.bff
-rw-rw-r-- 1 45776101 1 14192640 Nov 22 2002 vac.C.5.0.2.6.bff
# wget ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/fixes/v4/other/vac.C.5.0.2.6.bff
#

Likewise on all other OS levels. Then execute the follow-
ing command, and fill in its choices

# smit install_update
-> Install and Update from LATEST Available Software
* INPUT device / directory for software [ vac.C.5.0.2.6.bff ]
[ OK ]
[ OK ]

Follow the messages ... and you're done.

If you like a more web-like approach, a good start point
can be http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/down-
loadaz.jsp and click "C for AIX", and follow the instruc-
tions.

The usenm option

If linking miniperl

cc -o miniperl ... miniperlmain.o opmini.o perl.o ... -lm -lc ...

causes error like this

ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .aintl
ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .copysignl
ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .syscall
ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .eaccess
ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .setresuid
ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .setresgid
ld: 0711-317 ERROR: Undefined symbol: .setproctitle
ld: 0711-345 Use the -bloadmap or -bnoquiet option to obtain more information.

you could retry with

make realclean
rm config.sh
./Configure -Dusenm ...

which makes Configure to use the "nm" tool when scanning
for library symbols, which usually is not done in AIX.

Related to this, you probably should not use the "-r"
option of Configure in AIX, because that affects of how
the "nm" tool is used.

Using GNU's gcc for building perl

Using gcc-3.x (tested with 3.0.4, 3.1, and 3.2) now works
out of the box, as do recent gcc-2.9 builds available
directly from IBM as part of their Linux compatibility
packages, available here:

http://www.ibm.com/servers/aix/products/aixos/linux/

Using Large Files with Perl

Should yield no problems.

Threaded Perl

Threads seem to work OK, though at the moment not all
tests pass when threads are used in combination with
64-bit configurations.

You may get a warning when doing a threaded build:

"pp_sys.c", line 4640.39: 1506-280 (W) Function argument assignment between types "unsigned char*" and "const void*" is not allowed.

The exact line number may vary, but if the warning (W)
comes from a line line this

hent = PerlSock_gethostbyaddr(addr, (Netdb_hlen_t) addrlen, addrtype);

in the "pp_ghostent" function, you may ignore it safely.
The warning is caused by the reentrant variant of
gethostbyaddr() having a slightly different prototype than
its non-reentrant variant, but the difference is not
really significant here.

64-bit Perl

If your AIX is installed with 64-bit support, you can
expect 64-bit configurations to work. In combination with
threads some tests might still fail.

AIX 4.2 and extensions using C++ with statics

In AIX 4.2 Perl extensions that use C++ functions that use
statics may have problems in that the statics are not get-
ting initialized. In newer AIX releases this has been
solved by linking Perl with the libC_r library, but unfor-
tunately in AIX 4.2 the said library has an obscure bug
where the various functions related to time (such as
time() and gettimeofday()) return broken values, and
therefore in AIX 4.2 Perl is not linked against the
libC_r.

AUTHOR
H.Merijn Brand

DATE
Version 0.0.6: 23 Dec 2002

perl v5.8.8 2006-01-07 PERLAIX(1)

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