The versions of Oracle were different versions, but the issue was related to TL08. Description of the issue and the solution:
Issue: core dump when running ‘opatch’ or ‘java’ command as dbuser.

This is caused by the environment variable MALLOCTYPE which is set under the dbuser profile in all instances.
in /home/db<instance>/.<instance>
export MALLOCTYPE=3.1

This seems to be historical (set in 2004 initially) to manage some memory issues running oracle under AIX 4.3.

MALLOCTYPE is also set in report60.sh under apps:

## MALLOCTYPE need to be defined on 4.3.x systems to 3.1 o.w. we may get
## coredump from X libraries
export MALLOCTYPE=3.1

Solution:
Oracle (SR 7170278.992) recommends to unset this at db user level but to leave it at apps level unless it causes problems.

Apologies for not replying earlier. No it was the Oracle patch data (Oracle inventory) that was "missing" after the migration (not an update_all). The problem has since been resolved by Oracle: the cause was an env variable set for the DB user. This was set when the system was still running AIX 43 to solve a memory issue. This variable setting seems to have caused a problem after vthe migration from AIX52 to AIX53. The variable was MALLOCTYPE and it was set to 3.1. After it was unset, the issue was solved.

Hi,

The Oracle inventory (where the patch data is kept) is empty after an upgrade to TL08. The problem did not occur after upgrading to TL06 and can't be reproduced on a TL06 system. Has anyone else encountered this problem when upgrading to TL08?