Skip to Main Content
IBM Power Ideas Portal


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against IBM Power Systems products, including IBM i. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas
  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Status Submitted
Workspace AIX
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 8, 2024

High priority login shell during low memory conditions

Over the years AIX has become very stable, but occasionally there's an AIX system that seems to hang when experiencing low memory/paging conditions. On the system some processes (that don't need to allocate new memory) continue to work happily, ping continues to respond, and so on ... but in general the system will appear to be hung/unresponsive/very slow. In situations like that it is very often no longer possible to login or add memory using DLPAR. If you are lucky to still have an active shell session and know the PID of the "guilty" process, you may be able to kill it and revive the system. If not, you can wait and hope the paging space kills will help you. Unfortunately, most of the times you will have to wait a very long time, if not forever. A reboot of the system is usually the only option.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a new feature that could avoid such reboots? Possibly this feature would allow a login from the console, present a shell with high priority (memory wise). A limited "shell" that just allows to get the list of processes and allows to execute a kill may be enough. This could be seen as the memory-equivalent of the System Hang Detection feature.

Idea priority Medium