What's new in AIX 7.3

Read about new or significantly changed information for the AIX 7.3 operating system.

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November 2023

The following information is a summary of the updates made to AIX 7.3.2 documentation. To see AIX commands specific summary of updates, see What's new in Commands. For pre-installation checks and changes, see AIX 7.3 Release Notes.

Added Sanitize operation for NVMe drives page under the Tasks and service aids topic.
Added information about AIX_CWD_CACHE tunable parameters in the Miscellaneous tunable parameters page.
Added a new timespec_get subroutine that retrieves the current calendar time based on the specified time zone.
Added IPSEC_p1_sa, IPSEC_p2_sa, IPSEC_ike_ver, IPSEC_auth_type, and IPSEC_noprop_ack audit events for Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) operations in the Audit events page.
Added information about the /etc/tunables/usermodified file in the Tunables file directory page.
Added I/O restrictions for Power-VC managed systems in the Live Update restrictions page.
Added audit support for the Enhanced Korn shell (ksh93) page.
Added a new value, LARGE_PAGE_EXCLUSIVE, for the ASO_OPTIONS environment variable in the Environment variables page that enables or disables the 16 MB Multiple Page Segment Size (MPSS) page management.
The PROC_Execute audit event can now be configured to log full file system path names for files.
AIX multi-path IO (MPIO) is enhanced to control the I/O traffic on congested paths when Fabric Performance Impact Notification (FPIN) congestion notifications are received from fabric switches.
IBM Security Directory Server (ISDS) Version 6.4 is replaced with IBM Security Verify Directory (ISVD) Version 10.0.
Added a new Object Data Manager (ODM) attribute lldp_mode to the EtherChannel device that displays the underlying adapter details in the LLDP neighbor information.

November 2022

The following information is a summary of the updates made to AIX 7.3.1 documentation. To see AIX commands specific summary of updates, see What's new in Commands. For pre-installation checks and changes, see AIX 7.3 Release Notes.

The AIX operating system provides quirks to support various third-party USB mass storage devices. For more information, see the AIX USB device quirks and the USB device support topics.
The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) that implements a domain name server for the AIX operating system, is upgraded from version 9.4.1 to 9.16.26. BIND version 9.16.26 is shipped in both Web download and base operating system for AIX 7.3.1 release. For more information, see the AIX Release Notes® and the following topics: named Daemon, named9 daemon, named-checkconf command, named-checkzone, named-compilezone command, rndc-confgen command, ddns-confgen, tsig-keygen command, dig command, host9 command, nslookup command, dnssec-cds command, dnssec-dsfromkey command, dnssec-importkey command, dnssec-keygen command, dnssec-revoke command, dnssec-settime command, dnssec-signzone command, dnssec-verify command, dnssec-checkds command, dnssec-coverage command, dnssec-keymgr command, nsupdate command, rndc command.
Added information about the -e flag in the ibv_devinfo command topic. The -e flag prints the extended group ID (GID) tables of the RDMA devices.
Added information about the -q flag in the ofedctrl command topic. The -q flag indicates whether the kernel extension is loaded or not.
Added information about the OFED configuration file.
Updated the following topics with information about the Power10 processors-based servers:
- IBM® AIX Dynamic System Optimizer
- Planning for the IBM AIX Dynamic System Optimizer
Added the lcpuid_to_bindid and bindid_to_lcpuid subroutines under Global interfaces in Perfstat API Programming. It returns the bind CPU ID and the logical CPU ID.
Added information about Using fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or user@FQDN with pre-shared key for IKEV2.
Added information about Configuring endpoints that are behind the NAT device under Network address translation.
Updated information about Encrypted physical volumes.
Added information about Creating shared memory objects with 1TB segment size. Shared memory object improves performance of processes by using large shared memory regions.
Updated the Live Update restrictions topic.
The network file system (NFS) client is enhanced to support file sizes that are greater than 16 TB. The current tested and supported maximum file size is 256 TB.

November 2021

The following information is a summary of the updates made to AIX 7.3 documentation. To see AIX commands specific summary of updates, see What's new in Commands.

Added information about the AIX update access key topic. AIX update access key (UAK) must be verified when you update the version of the AIX operating system.
The support to remove Java™ 5 software in the base operating system installation menus and in the bosinst_data resources for network migrations is deprecated.
Updated information about support for 64 KB pages in Active Memory Expansion (AME). AME supports enablement of 64 KB pages by default starting with Power10 processor-based servers.
You can encrypt LVs in the root volume group (rootvg) that are used in the boot process. For more information, see the Logical volume encryption topic.
Updated the options in the Installation and Settings SMIT menu. For more information about the options, see the BOS installation options topic.
You can now save and restore all AIX tunable parameter values after the next boot and next Live Update operations. Updated SMIT instructions in the Global manipulation of tuning parameters topic.
Updated information about -a nfs_version flag and -a sec_version flag in the Using the NIM bos_inst operation topic.
Updated information about AIX binary compatibility with AIX Version 7.3. For more information, see Restrictions for AIX binary compatibility.
AIX IP Security (IPsec) supports the Network Address Translation Traversal (NAT-T) function with Internet Key Exchange Version 2 (IKEv2). For more information, see Conﬁguring IP security (IKEv2) to work with NAT and Limitations when using the NAT-T function with IKEv2.
The AIX operating system supports fragmentation of IKE (IKE_AUTH) messages with Version 2 (IKEv2). For more information, see IKE (IKE_AUTH) message fragmentation.
Updated information about enhancements in SMB protocol 3.0.2 in the SMB client file system topic.
Updated information about the Fibre Channel Adapter Outstanding-Requests Limit in the Disk and disk adapter tunable parameters topic.
The M:N thread model is no longer supported. For more information, see the Thread tuning topic.
The process contention scope is no longer supported. For more information, see and pthread_attr_getscope and pthread_attr_setscope Subroutines topics.
Updated the Chinese (Hant) information in the Unicode encoded languages and locales in AIX table in the Supported languages and locales topic.
Updated information about a new fork capability that creates a child process that does not inherit shared memory in the following topics:
- fork, f_fork, p_fork, or vfork Subroutine
- posix_spawnattr_getflags or posix_spawnattr_setflags Subroutine
- posix_spawn or posix_spawnp Subroutine
Added information about the Special use system memory Subsystem. Special use system memory subsystem provides device driver support for memory technologies that can be used as disk storage.
Added information about the mksysb_iso command that creates a bootable ISO 9660 media from a system backup image (mksysb).
Added information about the lparstat command that reports logical partition (LPAR) related information and statistics.
The create_ova command uses the Nest Accelerator (NX) GZIP compression accelerator, when available, on POWER9™ and Power10 systems by using the pigz utility. Added information about the -c flag of the create_ova command that can use the gzip utility instead of the default pigz utility.
Support for Network Time Protocol (NTP) version 3 is removed. The following commands are no longer supported: xntpd, xntpdc, ntpdate, ntptrace, ntpq. For compatibility with earlier versions of NTP, the symbolic links point to NTP version 4 binary files by default so that the same commands continue to work. For more information, see Network Time Protocol (NTP).
Enhanced the pmcycles -M command to report the measured processor frequency.
Enhanced the lparstat -N command to report the EnergyScale power and performance mode and processor frequency information on Power10, and later, processor-based servers.