After reading this https://worthdoingbadly.com/aixqemu and this https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-ppc/2018-05/msg00387.html, I was inspired and very curious. Could I get AIX 7.2 running on QEMU on my MacBook Pro (running Mac OS X 10.13.6)?

Well, the answer my friends, is yes...sort of.

Many thanks to Rob McNelly who originally tweeted this link, https://worthdoingbadly.com/aixqemu. If he had not, I would never have made the journey to QEMU land. So thanks Rob!

Also, thanks to Liang Guo for his assistance. Your guidance was greatly appreciated.

Note: What I describe here is NOT supported by IBM. It is purely a lab experiment to see what was possible with qemu-system-ppc64.

If you want to follow along at home, please follow and test the steps outlined here, https://worthdoingbadly.com/aixqemu, first. If this works then you should be good to go with the rest of this article.

I've never used QEMU until now. So all of this is very new to me. I'm still learning, so if you see something wrong with my instructions. Sorry. I'll do better next time.

The first thing you need to do, is install AIX 7.2 in a Logical Partition (LPAR VM), on a Power system, somewhere. If you don't have an IBM Power System of your own, you could try using the https://www.ibm.com/partnerworld/page/stg_com_sys_power-development-platform. I recommend using AIX 7.2 TL3 SP1 for this experiment. My source LPAR was running 7200-03-01 on POWER8. Once you have an AIX system that you can use, follow each of the steps outlined in this document: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/cgaix/resource/AIX_QEMU_blog.pdf