Linux on S/390 Gaining Momentum

infodragon sent us a link to Open Source IT's story about Linux and the S/390. Not normally considered as sexy as some of the developments as Itanium and such, Linux on the S/390 has garnered a lot of attention from companies and is doing a great job of legitimizing Linux for many large companies.

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This article never appeared on the main page.

[jms]

This article apparently got lost in the slashdot server. It just appeared a few minutes ago in the "older stuff" column, having never appeared on the main page.

Quoting from the article"

An S/390 running a light load will not run as quickly as a fast PC server under a light load, according to Courtney. The difference between the two systems will not be apparent until the load is much larger.

"The PC will begin to degrade and will typically reach a point where it avalanches down in performance as its load limit is exceeded. The mainframe starts out at a lower performance level, from the standpoint of an individual program task, but degrades much more slowly and much more linearly as the load increases," he says.

I remember, a while ago, reading in another article about a difference of opinion between some IBM programmers and the kernel maintainers. Supposedly, IBM was complaining that Linux performance went south when the number of running tasks became large, and proposed some scheduler changes, but the kernel developers didn't want to change it because the changes would have slowed the kernel down in the "normal" case of only a few active processes. Does anyone have a link to this or remember what I'm talking about?

Sounds like this article is describing the same known effect.