AIX 32bit library limitation

[Jeff Dawson]

We run CIS 6.2.6.1 on AIX 7.2 TL 5 with plans to upgrade to CIS 22 hopefully this year.  We ran into an issue last week where a vendor sent a 150MB pdf that caused our thread acting as a server to crash due to a memory allocation error and throw a core dump.  I couldn’t even receive the message into the interface without the process crashing.   Eventually we had to ask the vendor to skip the message so anything in queue could process.

I spoke with Infor customer support and they let us know the issue is related to AIX being 32 bit and IBM has no plans to release 64bit libraries for AIX.  One of the main reasons we stay with AIX is that our EMR, Epic, runs on AIX as well.  The solution to this problem is this process that can receive large messages is always before starting the process is to issue the export command listed below.  Then the large message can be handled in the interface engine.

export LDR_CNTRL=’MAXDATA=0x3B9ACA00‘ ; hex value of 1000MB

hcienginerun -p <process name>

We’ve ran Cloverleaf on AIX since we started using this interface engine almost 20 years ago.  From what I recall AIX use to be one of the top O/S’s that clients used CIS with.  From what support mentioned a lot of customers have switched over to Windows/Linux (RHEL) based O/S’s due to the fact they support 64bit libraries and these types of memory allocation issues are not present and also financially less expensive than AIX.

My question to the Clovertech community has anyone started on AIX and made the transition to a different O/S due to this 32bit issue or even from a financial aspect of switching from AIX?

Topic

[Tim Pancost]

Hmmmm, something about that doesn’t seem quite right.  AIX has been 64-bit compatible, from what I’ve read, since version 5.  Are you on an earlier AIX version than that?  Looking at our own AIX box(AIX version 7.2.0.0), the kernel is in 64-bit mode:

CHiep1 /cloverleaf/cis20.1/integrator/bin
$ getconf KERNEL_BITMODE
64

That being said, when you look at the hciengine executable, it is a 32-bit application:

$ cd $HCIROOT/bin
CHiep1 /cloverleaf/cis20.1/integrator/bin
$ dump -ov hciengine

hciengine:

***Object Module Header***
# Sections Symbol Ptr # Symbols Opt Hdr Len Flags
7 0x007d33d6 51601 72 0x1042
Flags=( EXEC DYNLOAD DSA DEP_SYSTEM )
Timestamp = “Feb 11 00:03:31 2022”
Magic = 0x1df (32-bit XCOFF)

So, to me, the question is, would Infor offer a 64-bit version of Cloverleaf?

HTH,

TIM

Tim Pancost
Trinity Health

[Jeff Dawson]

Hi Tim ,

We are running the same version of AIX, 7.2, talking with our AIX admins they are stating the same thing that AIX appears to be 64bit enabled yet hciengine is only 32bit.  I’ve taken this back to Infor support and they are asking the developers about this.    I’m hoping at some point CIS will be able to run at 64bit however it was explained to me the limitation is on the AIX which doesn’t seem to be the case with the what I’m finding out however there may be other factors involved that Infor’s developers may clarify regarding AIX.  Will post what I find out and I also attached the document that Infor provided regarding this issue.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 3 weeks ago by Jeff Dawson.

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