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What's New With AIX 5L?

2006 a banner year for AIX 5L innovation.

The AIX 5L* OS is IBM's strategic platform for innovation for UNIX*. As you'll see in this article, 2006 - the 20th anniversary of AIX* - was a banner year for AIX 5L innovation.

In February, IBM introduced a new service and release strategy for the AIX 5L OS that included new maintenance packages, a new name for maintenance levels and, more importantly, longer support for maintenance levels.

The new maintenance packages are called service packs and concluding service packs. These new collections of fixes help make it easier to manage your AIX 5L software. Also, as part of this new service strategy, previous maintenance packages, called maintenance levels (MLs) were renamed to technology levels (TLs). The new name that more accurately describes the new hardware support, cumulative fixes and new AIX functionality that is often included in what IBM used to call a maintenance level. For details on this, see the article "Architecting a Strategy".

In addition to the new packages and the name change, IBM will now support a TL for up to a full year. In the past, IBM only supported a ML until the subsequent ML was released. With the new strategy, clients can continue to get support for a previous TL for up to six more months by installing the Concluding Service Pack and then installing Interim Fixes to address specific problems.

A complete description of the new release and service strategy along with other information for maintaining AIX 5L and System p* hardware is available online.

New Technology Levels

In compliance with the new release and service strategy, IBM released updates to AIX 5L in February: AIX 5L v5.3 TL4 and AIX 5L v5.2 TL8. These TLs included support for new servers based on the higher frequency POWER5+* processors and cumulative AIX 5L fixes but didn't include significant AIX 5L functionality.

In August, IBM released TL9 for AIX 5L v5.2 and TL5 for AIX 5L v5.3. Both of these releases included new support for high-end System p* servers based on POWER5+* processors.

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