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Main Linux Distros Port To IBM's S/390
SuSE has announced that they are going to release a beta SuSE Linux for IBM's S/390. A beta version will be out in late June. TurboLinux has signed an agreement to port their Linux distribution to S/390 as well. The only major distributor that is missing here is Redhat. What do you think about Linux distributions and the S/390??
Having to slug away with good 'ol OS/400 on a virtual terminal here at work has been quite an experiance for me...RPG is fun and all, but using the massive computing power of the S/390, and hopefully, the reset of the IBM Mid/Mainframes in the future, with a *nix is a boon to many of us IT types.. Plus, with IBM backing the Open Source movement, I think we could see a lot more acceptance in the "real world". 'Course, we can't let that go to Big Blue's head *LOL* --vvulfe@yahoo.com
The main points here are:
The S/390 is a superb, multi-user, highly secure stable machine; very scalable and powerful.
Linux is very popular and getting ever more so with Microsoft's security faux pas; it is fairly stable, and fairly secure so people are turning to it in droves for database/app serve/web serve type uses.
Put the two together and you get a powerful machine, which is no longer esoteric and scary. It becomes more 'everyday' and easily accepted. Okay, this will lower the average salaries of an S/390 tech, but it will open up the S/390 to companies who wouldn't have thought of it before.
Oh, and sources at IBM say Red Hat is working on it.
The Parking Lot Is Full
Aside from the target market, ISPs, not many folks will have a financial or work-related interest. I certainly won't. I've only worked at one company that even had a mainframe, and I was a user, not an admin at all. I'm still not an admin, and it's just not that likely I'll ever work with an S/390 or its successors.
However, I still care. This is really neat stuff. It tells me stuff about Linux, Linux kernel hackers, and IBM that are all good to hear. Just knowing that people are using Linux in this way, and that it works, is something I care about.
There are plenty of things which I care about that have little or no practical use to me. I'm probably never going to go to Mars, or other planetary systems. I still care about the research being done on them. I may never visit South Africa, or buy anything made there, or know anyone who lives there. But I'm still glad that the ANC won without a bloodbath. Only someone with no empathy or imagination would think that only those directly affected can care about something.
Hmmm... Actually, you could set up several VMs, use the internal networking, make one the controlling node and the others child nodes, and run a Beowulf internally in one S/390. I would think that that would put you well in the running for the "And the Point of This Was?" award.
Obligatory Disclaimer: I do work for IBM, and I am not representing the company or any part of it ... just speaking my own mind. Sheesh. :)
You might be surprised.
IBM announced some time ago that Linux compatibility was going to be added to AIX. While this may seem kinda backwards - I think it would be better to just make AIX fully Linux compatible, or scrap it entirely and run with Linux, period - it's an important signal of general acceptance of what's been called 'a college project gone horribly right'.
Don't forget, IBM's been in the computer business longer than pretty much anyone else (if someone's older, I'd like to know who), and nobody learned a lesson the way they did about trying to dictate market terms -- remember Microchannel, or the PCjr? Sometimes the best lead can be taken by following along a while and seeing what happens.
What I think we have here is not that there's an expectation that companies will ditch MVS in favor of running Linux on their S/390s, it's that companies that had no use for Big Iron with a cryptic and user-hostile OS may have use for Big Iron with a widely-distributed, widely-supported and widely-understood OS on it. After all, it's better to sell a nude S/390 than to not sell a fully loaded one.
ikaros, who, being a lowly field tech, does not have access to top secret marketing plans, but this sounds rational to me.
You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind -- Timothy Leary
will it be commercially sucessful. remember NT on RISC? it is an interesting reinvigoration strategy for S/390.... just got to fire up that S/390 in my basement and get to work on it. Or maybe IBM will give me one. ;-)
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
What you can't play 3d monster maze on your Cray? Why not? I know for a fact you can play Quake on a Cray do why not 3d monster maze.
;-)
With repect to the topic at hand I personally don't play with s/390s on a daily basis busis but allowing your mainframe (if you already have one for your SAP/Peoplesoft stuffs) to function as a web server as well is smart strategy in leveraging existing resources. Bringing linux to the high end computing market is probably important than some of the other features we linux freaks has been clamouring for because those computers have sufficient omph to do mission critical apps.
By the way I want a s/390
Many of the newer IBM mainframe machines are air cooled (no water chiller needed) and could probably be run in a normal house with a decent air conditioning system.
I think I covered this in point #1, we can already run mutiple instances of linux in virtual machine mode. The subject of this thread is a *native* port....
It runs in native mode (bare metal). Done that. It
runs in LPAR - done that, too. And it runs as a
guest under VM - do that all day every day. It's
good stuff.
Linux on S390 is an ASCII machine - USS under
OS/390 is EBCDIC - that's often a nightmare when
trying to port software - ask me, I know - it's
my day job!
Linux on S390 supports ext2fs. It's reasonable to
expect there will be a CMS filesystem driver some
day as well.
All in all, Linux on S390 is pretty darn good.
Port done by Alan and the kernel team, with input from IBM...support exists in every kernel after 2.2.13 (princeton u.) and is stock in every source image since 2.2.14. Keep in mind that without Linus' say-so, it ain't in the kernel and it ain't Linux!
Marist College and Princeton University did it first. I don't know where Dr. Vepstas (the guy who did it in a lunch hour) teaches, but I don't think he's an IBM fellow.
IBM arrived to this, like Apache, late. However, they saw the value in how this was done, saw it worked and decided (rightly) not to screw with it.
IRON PENGUIN FOREVER!!!!
http://linux.s390.org/
http://linas.org
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
While I'd agree that Linux on S390 doesn't need CICS to be useful, CICS isn't strictly a mainframe thing. IBM has versions of CICS for AIX and OS/2. There are 3rd party software developers who do products like UniKix which is a CICS emulator for many of the commercial UNIXes. There isn't any reason why one of those couldn't be ported to Linux on S390.
The reliability of a mainframe comes not from the software (though that is a factor) but from the hardware.
Wrong. It comes from redundancy built into both the hardware and software. The hardware is only as reliable as the software running on it and vice versa.
Finkployd
Umm, it's MVS, not VMS. MVS is run by 390 machines, VMS is run by VAX'es and Digital Alpha chips. -Steve
My intelligence insults itself.
It's called ThinkBlue Linux, or Iron Penguin. http://linux.s390.org
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
TurboLinux already has an Itanium port, and it was out well before RedHat's.
I work on a fairly small mainframe (oxymoron) running OS/390, programming COBOL on loan systems on a small co-op bank--I've got a PII/450 running W98 on my desk that only gets used as a 3270 emulator (and Web browser when the boss isn't looking). There's nothing new, sexy, or "hip" about S/390 mainframes, but they are dead solid reliable. They just don't break.
So of course our CIO is hellbent on scrapping our ugly but functional COBOL-based systems for the Brave New World of client/server, VB 6, SQL Server 7, Microsoft everything, distributed processing, blah blah blah. Forget what works, it isn't New! and Improved! so we dump it and go for eye candy. This is why I like seeing stuff like this--keep that super-reliable raised-floor gear but bring it forward into the 21st century, or at least the mid-90s.
This sure seems like the best of both worlds--mainframe reliability and *nix flexibility. Now, when the heavy iron operations people meet the Linux geeks, that is gonna be fun...
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
On the website, the S/390 looks to be no bigger than an ordinary PC - or is that just the way the pic looks? Also, how much are they? It's exciting to think that linux may be the instrument to bring greater variety to the hardware world ... it's already doing so, but slowly.
support gun control: take guns from cops
While the availability of our familiar distributions is nice, it's not that important in the scheme of things. Of more significance, by far, is that fact that IBM is now officially supporting the S/390 port. It had previously been available for free download, but that's not going to convince an IT manager to install it as a mission critical system. The fact that it is now supported by IGS (IBM Global Services), however, is likely to make them sit and and take notice. IBM offering the same consulting and implementation services that they offer for other S/390 OSes is a major boost. It make Linux/S390 into a mainstream platform. The importance of that shouldn't be underestimated.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I think you can get S/390 cards for your PC. You won't get the mainframe reliability - which is the whole point of having a mainframe - but you will get a good chunk of the speed.
Even an S/390 emulator might run Linux at reasonable speeds, if you run the emulator on a modern PC or workstation.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The average S/390 is capable of running numerous virtual Linux boxes at once (several thousand I read). For major software developers (read megabucks budget), any or all of the distros could be loaded into a VM to test the product.
Having thousands of concurrent Linux boxes running offers another option. Web server software to date has been developed on the basis of multiple users using a single server. OK, there is load balancing, but this doesn't alter the paradigm, it merely loosens a few of the constraints. The S/390 opens up the option of each user connected to the site having one (or more) virtual Linux boxes of their very own to process their transactions (or whatever). What could your e-commerce site do with that ?
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
Actually the point of the articles and press releases is that Linux will now run natively on an S/390 and not just inside a virtual machine on OS/390. That is pretty damn cool :)
:-) and crazy I/O channels.
:-)
Yeah, that is pretty damn cool, but not terribly useful. I think it would be much more useful running under a virtual machine. Linux just can't possibly take full advantage of that hardware, what with all the billions of CPUs (err... maybe not billions
I'd love to see some performance specs on Linux vs OS/390!
I'm sure it would get creamed. Except for Intel chips (maybe others too, but I know not Alpha or PPC), Linux is generally not as fast on the hardware as operating systems which were designed specifically for that hardware.
On a related off-topic topic (?), does anybody know if Compaq is still doing that free Tru64 for personal use thing? I'd love to give that a test drive on my Alpha (or, if nothing else, just steal the math libs and compiler to run under Linux with the Tru64 emulation libs
--
Yes, I agree with AC. Will Volkerding put S-390 support in the Slackware Dist?
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www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
I've got three-phase in my house, don't you?
A few of you have indicated that this instance would be a guest OS, probably under VM. That fact isn't made clear in the announcement and AFAIK that is not a requirement to run Linux on a S390 server. That is, one of the big hurdles to running Linux on S390 is to NOT run it as a VM guest instead running it native on the HW. The big problem is to support native IO, channels and whatnot. The other problem is that Linux does not support any 'native' S390 FS so you have implement some extensions to the OS in order to overlay a Linux FS on top of the basic FS functions on the S390. This, instead of attempting to create PDS's and so on within Linux. All of this work seems to be a follow on to work directed at doing more or less the same thing for AIX on S390 which has been around for several years. In fact OS/390 pretty much IS a Unix variant running on S390 - at least it's certified that way.
Wow, everybody does Linux! We should not stay out of this. We should do some Linux too. Let's close this project, this and that, then spend $x.xxE6 on this and see.
Heh, just call me picky today... :-)
It surprises me how most people don't remember that VMS was born on the VAX architecture. Not too different from the folks who think that PCs started with Pentiums. I'll concede that it was more of an oversight or omission than an error.
Methinks you're referring to an older version of VMS. It's had a journaled filesystem (the Spiralog file system) since v7.0 or maybe the later v6.x releases (if memory serves). Don't ask me about it though; we never used at the last VMS site I worked at though I know some people swear by it (while others swear at it). It's not IBM's jfs, DEC's advfs, or whatever Veritas's is called but it's not really FAT-like either or so I understand. Now Files-11 is/was sort of FATty but I've never actually had a corrupted file on a File-11 disk while I've had, and seen countless other people have too, plenty of experience losing files on FAT-based filesystems (via the infamous cross-linked cluster problem). I suspect, though, that most of those losses were due to essentially being root on the PC when using DOS/Windows and its propensity to crashing. If I ran around on VMS systems with BYPASS privilege turned on all the time, I would expect more problems.
As for the drive letters: I never found the drive naming to be a problem. It was tons better than PCs had at the time. I suppose it depends on whet you used first. Personally, I'd find it somewhat annoying to go back to drive letters nowadays. In fact, I currently find it annoying as hell that Linux still uses sequentially assigned drive letters in the SCSI subsystem when other, more transparent, naming conventions exist (especially, since I was using a PC UNIX in the early '90s that didn't have this limitation). One wonders why the kernel developers seem to hate the way System V handles SCSI devices. Oh, well.
Just what are the complaints about Compaq's hardware? I've never heard anyone complain about the VAX and Alpha hardware before other than about the price. Now Compaq's PC hardware? That's another story and I do know of techs who will say it ``bites''.
Not sure what you're driving at with this comment. What kind of ``cluster'' is this, I wonder. It sounds like you mean hardware fault tolerance. Buy a Tandem or a Stratus. They're hard to beat FT-wise. Of course, you gotta have some pretty deep pockets to consider those hardware platforms.
rtscts? Gee, I'm still getting by with xonxoff.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
According to most recent polls, Debian is either the most popular or second most popular Linux distro.
Anyone who receieved a Linux Journal in the last few days will notice there is a HUGE article about the S/390 and the linux port done by both IBM and hte Open Source community.
:)
It also goes to mention that in the IBM port, there are a couple of core level modules (i'm not much with a S/390 so not sure what they are) that are object code only, IOW, not open source.
I have no problem with this other than the fact that Debian, which is mentioned as having a port in the works (the writer of the article is a core debian maintainer), prides itself in being a "Free Software Only" distribution. I'd really like to hear some comments on why that is or should be any different for this case.
The big advantage from what I can tell is not even runnign linux as the core OS, but running it under the very powerful VM mechanisms in the S/390 (the article explains how the VM is actually tied into the HARDWARE, which just plain rules) allowed the writer of the full free software kernel port (which is not finished, IBM did a private port and announced it this month) to START OVER *41,000* COPIES OF LINUX + THE APACHE WEBSERVER! Good LORD!
So don't kid yourself, with native power like that, no one is going to even bother running linux standalone on one of these things, not to mention there is much cheaper, adequate hardware that will run linux by itself - a S/390 is a very high end machine and chances are it's going to be a cold day in hell before the suits let you throw your "Free OS" directly on the machine.
But that doesn't matter, from the article I gathered it's going to be much more popular in a VM.
-Erik-
Most 390s are probably still running old COBOL stuff, that's my guess. And the knowledge pool for that old software is drying up. So if a business can keep that monster humming in the basement and shift to a "modern" language, thus allowing them to recruit new talent...hey, why not? And maybe they can teach a couple of the new guys some COBOL to keep the old applications running until they can be ported over. :)
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
Well I've played on it at work - lynx, apache
and samba all compiled fine.
It looks mostly like linux on intel - configure
can barf when it sees *-s390-* as the host
to configure against but thats an application
configuration problem, easily worked round.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
Why the hell was this moderated up? It sure as hell isn't insightful, every article posted on /. about Linux on the 390 has said the same thing as this guy, only much better. No offense to Sp0ng or anything but at least a couple moderators must be smoking crack.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
If you give me a free S/390 I'll do a review for you...
--
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You are right, Mhz isn't everything. For the 390, it is fairly telling. I don't recall any superscaler implmentations. I don't beleve it has a fused FP multiply and add. For FP it just isn't all that fast, nor even for 32 bit integer math. On the other hand it's BCD math can be quite fast (single instruction for most ops, something like 40 or 60ish digets supported in hardware, more possable with OS assist). Translate table instructions.
If it's I/O you need fast a 390 can do it. If it is something else you need fast, there is almost certonally another computer that will do it better. Frequently even made by IBM :-)
For FP Fortran code, I would guess a Alpha would really run much faster (in absolute terms, or per dollar) then a 390, unless you have quite a bit of I/O going on. Even then maybe. I'm sure Compaq has a F90 compiler.
Of corse the 390 is very very very good at making sure that the answer you get is right. It's somewhat fault tolerent, but more importantly for many applications it actaully notices many kinds of breakage and will let you know about them rather then blondering on with the wrong answers.
There may be some life left in my Apple ][ yet!
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
At this point there are 76148 machines registered; one of these could increase this number by 50%!
I can imagine some really big clusters.
However, I will grant that there's a great many computational problems that don't parralellize that way, and some of those it may very well be impossible to build a cluster that's faster than a top-end mainframe (or supercomputer).
All depends on your workload...
I have had some experience with IBM AS/400's and I know that they are rock solid and I hear the same things about the S/390's. I don't know why you wouldn't run a VM Linux session to at least check it out. There are a lot scarier things out there than Linux on mainframes!!
I heard that they were going to phase out totally in favor of Linux.
I wonder what the banks will think of that?
I guess my stupid questions is Why? What advantages are there to running Linux on a mainframe?
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
>There are several thousand supported >instructions on IBM's assembler for OS/390. Are you talking directives provided by the assembler or S/390 instructions? You can write an S/390 disassembler in less than several thousand lines including tables. Maybe you're talking about assembly language macros which interface with operating system services (e.g., STORAGE, WTO, ATTACH, etc.)?
Actually, I want Debian. It's the one distribution that you can get for every single platform (that I can think of anyway).
It's an administrators dream.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Being a person trained to use JCL I welcome the addition of LINUX as an OS for s/390. Should make things a little easier to do anyways.
Don't laugh. It may not be Linux but....
. html
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Well, let's see. Ever since my 390 replaced my refrigerator in my kitchen, I've been looking something a little less cumbersome than MVS and cheaper than OE. This is a God send... Ok, really,... The only people who could afford (or atleast have a use for a 390) aren't saving that much cash by running linux. Is it worth the risk? A high end company invests in a 390 for it's mission critical enterprise solutions (..insert other buzz words here..) Are they going to use a tried and true OS/390 that's been hacked and rehacked for 30+ years and is possibly the most stable OS around or are they going to go with the new Linux port?
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
SuSE must have taken in account the possibility of running 1000's of Linux instances on every installed S/390 to decide if there would be enough users to make a port worthwhile.
If you allocate the equivalent of a c64 to each user, S/390 might very well surpass the i386 world Linux userbase.
I challenge you all to download the ISO in the name of Discordia. Fnord
Now I have to clean out my basement. There's nowhere else in the house big enough for an S/390 and the disk farm that I'm going to want attached to it. And I'm definitely going to need something faster than a single cable modem. My heating problems are solved!
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Am I missing something here? I see a lot of negative comments, but this seems like a good thing for Linux. It is one more server platform that, when viewed as a piece of the total server pie, gives people options.
Even if it does involve older hardware in some cases (as another post mentioned/accused), that extends the life of something that may lose its base of support otherwise.
-L
What would really be an accomplishment would be to port Linux to a z80 machine.
Anybody done it already? I know Elks has one to the 8088/8086.
Even an 8080 would be pretty nice . . .
redhat suse caldera all of them make money from media sales and more from Services. Linuxmall sells cds for each distro at 1.99/cd.. thats not enough money to retire on.. the service is where the value is.. as for ibm.. they make money by selling the mainframe and services on top of that.
whoever thinks there is no market for mainframes.. hasn't dealt with a true enterprise system.
Right now
linux on a x86 is a promising student
Sparc is the adolescent.. very good at what he does.. but not the best.. not wise etc..
IBM's mainframes are the old masters.. strong, wise mature and proven.
I think Linux on mainframes is a good thing(tm).
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Linix has software reliability - and can be hardened even more. But the platforms it runs on die when the bits get dropped.
On mainframes, no bits drop. (Actually, they do. But the mainframe fixes it and keeps on going. So as far as the software is concerned the computer is perfect.)
Now suppose you want to do a reliable web server for an enterprise:
- You could do a farm of PCs running Linux and Apache. But when a processor failes you lose the transactions in progress there.
- You could port Apache to (or write a web server for) an ordinary mainframe OS.
- You could port Apache to a mainframe Unix. (Has been done for UTS - Amdahl's mainframe SVR4. But while that will run on IBM mainframes it isn't from IBM.)
- You could port Linux to a mainframe. Apache and EVERYTHING ELSE UNIX/LINUX comes along for free.
Lots of other uses for Linux on a mainframe, of course. Mainframe reliability, capacity, and speed, combined with Linux reliability and functionality, is a powerful combination. But I bet enterprise-reliable web servers are the first "Killer App".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Nope, not true. IBM S/390 systems have had TCP/IP available since the early 1980s when Dr. Larry Landweber's group out at U. Wisconsin wrote the precursor to IBM's current VM stack, "WISCNET" as the core for the CSNET network. To this day, IBM's "TCP/IP for VM/ESA" stack supports 14.0.0.1 as a loopback address because CSNET was net 14.
I think the whole point is, you'd have one machine doing nearly everything. Have one LPAR running /DB\/?2/ maybe running some legacy cics/cobol apps, have another one running linux as a webserver / samba server. It can talk to the db2 server with a ridiculously high-bandwidth connection. need another server for something, or want a test environment? Just fire off another one.
MVS, while unpleasant at best, from a user's perspctive, has power roughly equivalent to an aircraft carrier. If you want to abuse that metaphor a little (and I do), maybe linux is the fleet of planes based off that carrier?
Anyway, we have some big iron here where I (for the next week at least) work, and there are aspects of it that rock nads. It's uber-reliable, and relatively low cost, in some respects. For companies that already use mainframes, this is simply beyond cool. We all know how well linux integrates with disparate systems. MVS is about as poor at that as linux is good, so this could be a piece which ties everything together.
One more drink, and I'll move on. --Dave Matthews Band
The only problem with porting Linux to a mainframe is that Linux is probably too slow. I work with an S/390 at Northern Illinois University, and have experienced firsthand just how slow mainframes run. Contrary to popular belief, mainframes are not fast machines - the average Sun server can run circles around a mainframe in terms of instructions executed per second. However, mainframes make up for slow processor speed with massive IO capabilities - and given that most data processing tasks are IO bound, this is good design. However, Linux wasn't designed to be run on systems where every single processor cycle counts, and MVS was. Granted, MVS is a piece of junk from the user's perspective, and I would rather run Linux any day. But I don't think that Linux will make successful inroads into the mainframe community simply because it is a processor-cycle intensive operating system; this isn't a problem on PC's which have processor cycles to waste, but on a mainframe, where every clock cycle counts, Linux would probably be more of a drag on the system than anything else. Think about it - if you have to process 250 million records, you don't need the OS taking away any more clock cycles than absolutely necessary, and a kernel written in C with portability in mind can't possibly be as efficient as one written specifically for the hardware (and probably in assembler).
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No, of course not.
The same applies to Linux/x86, of course; let's pick the one distribution that should be the only one on x86. :-)
As far as I know, the "port", in the sense of "kernel, glibc, compiler, binutils (and perhaps gdb)" (i.e., the part of a Linux distribution that contains the most platform-dependent code - other than perhaps the X server) has already been done, just as it's been done for x86, Alpha, etc.; I presume what TurboLinux, SuSE, etc. will be doing will be combining that with their distributions to make S/390 versions, to go along with versions for whatever other processors the distributors in question support.
Well, IBM helped with the support, so they presumably provided access to the system. So, it presumably cost no more to do this port then it would to any other platform (& maybe less depending on just how much help IBM provided). But I suspect that there are two factors that make the port reasonable for SuSE. As the last person pointed out, the first is support. The other is convenience. If you run SuSE on the mainframe, you're more likely to run it on your desktop systems, & your employees will probably run it on their PCs at home.
1. We've been able to run Linux on S/390's for a long time, in virtual machine mode. This is pretty neat but has limited practical usage. 2.IBM has had Linux available for the S/390 since January! 3.A mainframe is VERY expensive to purchase and maintain (or lease). Who's going to make that kind of investment to run an operating system that wastes a good percentage of those expensive MIPS when OS/390:MVS does a much better job? 4. Mainframes are used for mission critical, enterprise level proccessing. Who's going to tell the 25,000 users who depend on the mainframe to do thier jobs, that we're going to switch operating systems and then rewrite or recompile the 18,000 jobs and associated programs that execute every night? Not me. I like my job. *--> "Go away or I shall taunt you a second time!" *-->
I knew nothing at mainframes until I worked at a shop where one was used. Coming from a Windoze/UNIX background I was really really surprised to learn that there is this whole other mainframe universe in which there are many people working, coding, and living as if Windoze and UNIX didn't even exist. (Well, of course they're all aware of Microsoft.)
I got to learn a little bit about OS/390 (the operating system which runs on those mainframes) and it's a nightmare (in this UNIX bigot's opinion). lrecl, fb or vb, PDSes, GDGs, ftp commands like 'put BFDG.XD.DIWDOS(+1)', ISPF, fortythousand acronyms, gawd. From what I understand, IBM didn't even consider supporting TCP/IP until about ten years ago or so -- for a very Microsoft reason: they don't want to support any protocols they can't control (see also Direct3D vs. OpenGL and kerberos). There are several thousand supported instructions on IBM's assembler for OS/390. This is because there was such a huge number of assembler programmers for OS/390 IBM kept adding instructions to make programming easier. If I understand correctly, I think there is even a "print" instruction in OS/390 assembler.
90% of IBM's products =~ m|\w\w?/\d{1,4}|;
But the IBM of today is, what appears to me, a very different company. The prospect of running Linux on IBM is, in my mind, revolutionary for IBM. The prospects of Linux on IBM look really cool -- kind of like compacting hundreds of linux boxen into one big, black, airstreamed box with a big, red, candylike power switch that screams "Flip me!" So I think this is great. The more Linux, the better.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
There was a PC370 add on card for MCA bus IBM PS2's. There was an RS370-390 add on card for older RS6000's. Both of these had channel IO emulation. There was an RS6000 add on card for PS2's. There was hybrid 370 machine called the 9370 that came with an Intel add on board - again here an MCA type. The AS400 LAN connect server is an Intel board inside. None of these are real elegant.
Here's a session from Unix to OS/390 (MVS), I use it all the time, in both directions. We also have mainframe jobs ftp files to servers, even to a Linux box.
/home/snfs01/alanw [!] > ftp mvsk
Connected to mvsk.dev.sabre.com.
220 MVSSYK -- FTP Server, Enter command or HELP
Name (mvsk:alanw): z6504
331 Enter PASS command
Password:
230--- GREETINGS ---
*** TCPaccess (FTP) for MVS-SYK ***
Logged in - User=Z6504 Working directory "Z6504."
230 The local host for the control connection is 144.9.3.2.
ftp> ls
200 OK, Ready
125 Transfer started
AABKTFST.FAC1
ISPF.ISPPROF
MESSAGE.LOG
ROSS.DATAPULL
TEST.SAS
TKDATA
226-Transfer complete. 75 bytes sent in 0.04 seconds (1875 bytes/s)
Path name: Z6504. User=Z6504 Data bytes read: 63.
226 End of reply.
75 bytes received in 0.08 seconds (0.91 Kbytes/s)
ftp>
See - no problem! I've also used the command shell and tools like awk on the mainframe. But wait, I was doing that in 1994....
Sorry, but most fortune 500 shops rely upon IBM mainframes to crunch through the data in their core business applications.
;)
Although Linux is an elegant OS with a bright future, at the moment it suffers from youth and the deficiencies of its original platform: the PC.
1. Raw I/O throughput. The strength of a mainframe resides primarily in its enormous capacity to move data through I/O channels. Separate I/O controllers handle most devices (like the I20 architecture), so the main CPUs are free to focus on computing tasks. The PC is not even in the same league--yet.
2. Advanced enterprise features, such as hierarchical storage management. Although Linux is moving towards LVM (Linux Volume Manager) to handle disk space, the mainframe data management facilities go one further: the OS will automatically migrate unused data from "small," fast hard drives to slower, larger hard drives, and finally to removable tape storage. This means that, unlike Linux where we manage mount points and disk partitions, the OS takes care of moving data around on all of its volumes to ensure best access. To the user (and an administrator), the sum total of all available hard disks and all cataloged tapes represents the complete collection of available data: terabytes upon terabytes of storage!
3. Another advanced feature: machine partitioning. Although incorporation of the User Mode Kernel is a step in the right direction, OS/390 (and high-end UNIX platforms, such as SUN, as well) allow an adminstrator to _partition_ a machine into completely isolated units, or partitions. Not to be confused with the Virtual Machine capability much discussed with Linux on S/390, but a partition is simply a fixed allocation of CPUs, memory, and I/O devices to an instance of a running OS/390 system.
What that means is 1 box may be split into multiple partitions, and each partition may have completely separate disk drives, memory, CPUs, etc. Basically, each partition becomes it's own machine, which can be useful for segregating activities onto different sets of resources (e.g., a test or development partition and a production partition). S/390 can do this because of hardware support, but unfortunately, efforts such as the User Mode Kernel do not achieve quite the same results: the "partitions" or "user mode kernels" still share the same underlying kernel data structures. If one UMK craps out, it could potentially bring down the whole machine.
Of course, give the Linux/Open Source community another 6 months, and it will solve all of these in spades.
Which is available by IBM, have a look at the S/390 site
See ya, Thomas
I wonder what they would call it.... Big Blue Hat?
-- Some people say they can tell the time by looking at the Sun, but I have trouble seeing the numbers.
Meaning a native port of some flavor of UNIX, or S/390 Open Edition? If the latter, then you may already have given the reason:
meaning it may be easier to put Linux on an S/390 (or in a virtual machine or logical partition on an S/390) than to put some New Economy Dot Com applications on Open Edition.
General-register-based architecture, 16 general-purpose registers, 4 (or is it 8 or more, now?) floating-point registers, memory-to-register and register-to-register arithmetic instructions - not all that different from VAXes, 68Ks, x86's; it's just another general-register-based CISC box. (Yeah, it has specialized instructions, but so do the other CISCs for which GCC generates code; you don't necessarily have to use them.)
The relatively short offsets in instructions may be the biggest problem.
Linux has already been ported; presumably SuSE and TurboLinux will be integrating the kernel, glibc, GCC, binutils, GDB, etc. changes into their distributions.
There's been S/370 support in GCC for a while,a s I remember; the S/3x0 config directory of the EGCS source includes notes and checkins that suggest support (e.g, the 1.3 version of the README file says that it currently "supports three different styles of assembly", including MVS using the HLASM assembler, S/390 Open Edition, and "ELF/Linux for use with the binutils/gas GNU assembler".
There's also, in the GAS CVS tree, tc-i370.c and tc-i370.h files (which are for S/360 and S/390 as well as S/370, according to the comment).
I've been working decades on the
It would be going backwards to port Linux from the ASCII world to EBCDIC.
Even IBM's VM architecture is too esoteric, although it incorporates some features we find on Unix. (I see "Linux" as a "Unix flavor".)
There is NO point in creating some kind of emulation on an IBM mainframe running MVS/ESA, like an ES/9000 and the /390 do.
Or would you write an emulation to run IBM's EBCDIC on Linux ?? The system architecture is from another planet !
Believe me, I've been working on both systems long enough...
Still if you like cool IBM hardware go check out the AS/400. You can literally upgrade from a 32 bit to a 64 bit processor and guarantee no bugs. The AS/400 suffers from some of the worst marketing by IBM around, but it is still cool as hell. Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
I'm always learning something new about IBM. They are an amazing company -- even if part of their history is downright evil. For a while they had a compilier which they considered so awesome that they wouldn't even sell it. You had to ship your source code to IBM on tape, they would compile it, and then return the object code to you on tape. Hearing that was almost too much for my little GPL-steeped brain to handle. ;)
Having said that, their mainframe products are still the gold standard for speed and reliability in a corporate IT environment.
Agreed, particularly on the reliability front. Perhaps the speed would be more obvious if OS/390 wasn't so sucky! (Again, my biased opinion.) Some folks don't seem to realize that (I think) every bank and financial institution on the planet relies on an IBM mainframe and that won't be changing anytime soon. IBM is faaaar from irrelevent.
Which means that some of us UNIX people are going to have to continue to be familiar with all those ridiculous acronyms and gobs of proprietary, expensive IBM hardware. As long as we don't have to learn SNA!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Man, you guys are easy!!!!
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
I figured we solve all our problems in one shot:
Run IBM's mainframe w/ virtual machines to emulate the SPARCS, then emulate a few Linux servers for the end users to boot from, which will turn their machines into dumb X terminals, while still giving them ports of their favorite apps (WP and NS). The users keep their current apps and get the benefit of using Color X (they don't even have cut-and-paste now!) for their database work, the company doesn't have to buy new hardware for like 10 years, and I don't have to screw around with windows.
I guess I'm just dreaming again.
-jpowers
-jpowers
I suppose that building a mainframe distribution is very costly. (I suppose they need at least one expensive actual mainframe to do the testing, don't they?)
And then, since it is mainly GPL software, you could buy just one copy (disc? tape?) of a distro and install it in all the virtual machines of all the mainframes in the company. So you have a maximum number of sales as big as the number of Data Processing departments that run S/390s. I expect this number to be small, at least, compared to the number of individual-owned PCs.
So I think that the number of sales of these distributions has to be very low (comparing to PC distros). And media sales is the main revenue of distribution makers.
Am I wrong?
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
IIRC, 390 allows for "partitioning", where different things (OSes, for example) can run natively on the H/W under different HW/firmware partitions (There is a "supervisor" console to manage this). Thus, you have native MVS alongside native Linux, and then UNIX-only apps port easily but you don't deprive the other users of anything.
An S80 is SP/2 hardware. I haven't heard anything about Linux on an SP/2 yet, but I would be surprised if it wasn't running somewhere. There are a lot of hardware bits that someone would need to make Linux support, but if it's running on an S/390 I don't think porting it to an SP/2 will be a big deal.
the S/390 may not be one of IBM's fastest machines for benchmarks but it is definitely one it's most powerful machines. We have a group of SP's including 2 (soon to be 4) S80's and we are going to have to _upgrade_ to an S/390. The SP's can't offer us the horsepower and uptime that the S/390 can. The SP's will be great for our data-warehouse, but for the real heavy financials and SAP work, the S/390 is what we'll need.
forge
This would undoubtedly be a neat hack, and nice to have, but first, I'm guessing this is going to impact roughly 0.02% of slashdot, and second, they shouldn't be doing it for business reasons, since there already is UNIX on os/390.
At my job I spend a lot of time working with IBM's Open Edition, which is a UNIX that IBM implemented on top of os/390. It is very, very strange as UNIX goes. A lot of common things you associate with unix aren't there like a password file, and other common facilities. Things are put in very strange places on the filesystem, and the way the backend works, (i.e. how it interfaces with MVS) is far weirder than weird. That said, it's a very interesting system that seems pretty stable.
Unfortunately, none of the architecture dependant GNU utilities will compile on this beast, since the hardware isn't even similar to anything unix boxes are used to running on. If suse is going to port linux, they may encounter the hardest part in porting things like gas and gcc, since AFAIK they don't know how to spit out binary for this CPU as of now.
(FYI for people who aren't familiar with OS/390 - it's IBM's mainframe OS. These types of boxes generally start in the $60,000 range for one that probably isn't worth using, and range in price up to the multi-million dollar range. On the one I work on, each individual CPU costs $200K.)
That's why I say probably most slashdot readers won't care. For the vast majority of people, they never work with a mainframe because the only people who can afford to have mainframes are large organizations. (The federal reserve has some bitchin huge mainframes)
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Why not just download the compilers and math libs that have been ported from Tru64 to Linux?
http://www.compaq.com/linux
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Fair enough: you are correct. That's the point of "user mode kernel:" if it's in user-space, it can crap out just like any other user-space app, so the rest of the system is safe.
However, valuable as UMK is for some applications, it's (yet) not in the same league as mainframe partitioning.
1. The OS and system software on mainframe partitions may be upgraded separately without affecting other active partitions. UMKs, too, can be upgraded, but if the real kernel has to be upgraded, the whole machine goes down.
2. How well does the UMK protect the underlying real kernel (and thus other user-space apps) for excessive resource consumption? For example, what if an errant application running in an active UMK (or just buggy code in the kernel used by the UMK) starts spawning threads like crazy, will the UMK protect the rest of the real machine from adverse effects?
3. The UMK kernel, valuable as it is, is still limited in it's ability to differ from the true underlying kernel. For example, can a kernel within a UMK provide a different thread-scheduling policy that the underlying real kernel?
BTW: don't get me wrong, I love UMK and what it can become. It's quite an accomplishment to put such a thing together. Further, I may be incorrect about the completeness of it's operation. However, my whole point is to emphasize how in IBM's mainframe environment complete isolation of distinct partitions is very easy, and it's a feature that the Linux commmunity may wish to emulate as it moves further into enterprise computing territory.
They arn't so much faster and more reliable then the latest cluster systems so much as actually being the latest cluster systems. Oh, and being far more reliable (lots of check logic, ECC on the cache, and register files, not just main memory). Not so much the faster part though. The CPUs only run a few hundrad Mhz (last year 300Mhz to 400Mhz was extreamly fast for them). Of corse they have dedicated IO processors, and small tens of CPUs is a common size.
Most of the innovations in clustering in the micro world is re-inventing what mainframes have allready been doing. Then again so was having caches, and out-of-order execution. That's not to say micros didn't invent something, or that finding the right time to re-use what had gone before isn't hard in and of itself.
This is far more important to Linux as a community as it shows the big businesses that Linux is REAL, in a way that they understand. The fact that almost no one will actually use Linux on S/390s (apart from over a VM) is irrelevant, the execs will see that Linux is now available on the most hard core piece of big iron in the world, and so it is no longer just a toy.
Secondly, IT budgets aren't spent by old farts. They are spent by CTOs who really know their stuff, and they buy S/390s because they provide unparalled reliability, scaleability and cost effectiveness when used for server consolidation within large corporations.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
This isn't offtopic, for the sorts of work being discussed, slack is a great distro. ALSO, it wasn't mentioned. Porting SLACK to S/390 is better than porting redhat.
Eh...
Your basic S/390 can run 200-300 Linux server images under VM. Taking the usual uptime and hardware failure figures into consideration, these 200 Linux "servers" will be VASTLY more reliable than the equivalent "real" Linux servers. In any large hosting environment, you've got machines crashing hard every week -- the MTBF really comes back to bite you when you're dealing with hundreds of physical units.
IBM doesn't think anybody in the world will go replace MVS with Linux. They're trying to grab the hosting market. Don't forget, when we talk about running 200 Linux servers, they're not talking about 200 hosting accounts -- they're talking about the equivalent of 200 actual servers, each of which would have bunches of hosting accounts on it.
Nobody is going to switch their bank transaction stuff over to Linux. IBM's just aiming for Sun. Besides which, I'm sure they're thinking about eventual transitions, etc.
. . . of course I could be wrong.
I have no
Caveat: I know absolutely nothing about the S/390.
This doesn't relate to how fast the actual computers are. Most of the supercomputers I use run under 300 MHz (even the ones purchased this year). Of course, most of those supercomputers are actually glorified clusters...
I haven't compiled my code for intel (it's in f90, and I have no intel f90 compiler for linux), but I would guess that they would easily kick the pants off of our 600 MHz linux boxen. I'll see if I ever bother with a linux port.
Of course, speed all depends on what the job is. In my case I run memory/floating point intensive quantum mechanics calculations.
Finally a comment made by someone who doesn't sound like he sits in front of a mirror squeezing spots and arguing the toss about a machine and OS they've never actually used!
The prattle in these parts lately reminds me of all those people in the late 80's/early 90's that claimed you can run your entire corporate data processing on a PC, all based upon their huge knowledge of doing a mail-merge.
Yeah, my zx81 with 16k wobbly RAM-pack is better than anything Cray ever delivered 'cos they can't run 3d monster maze, bagsy.
IBM is commiting to give users the chance to run Linux on their systems - but they can not possibly phase out their own OS for a simple reason: One of the main features of their systems is the ability to transparently virtualize everything. If you had a huge 370 devoted 100% to Linux, it would be a real waste of resources. You have to set up a virtual machine to do this - and that's where both OS's start playing along nicely.
My total traffic and other activity is low, but wouldn't it be nice to have some big horsepower and a big fat pipe whenever I need it?
I use RedHat right now, but I'd switch in a heartbeat. I've tested Mandrake and SuSE, and the switch from RedHat was painless. I've also played around with the other free unixalikes and they're all easy enough to change to that the distro is not overwhelmingly important.
Please, somebody, start offering virtual machine linux et al hosting: even if you inevitably decide to charge just a little too much for it, the new option will drive down the price that other ISPs will need to charge :)
Unless they get sponsorship from some huge company. Not that they couldn't do it, just that mainframes are so hugely expensive, that I really doubt they could afford one, or that they own even a small one already. Possibly if some huge company "donated" an LPAR for a period of time it'd be possible, but otherwise I don't know how they'd actually get a hold of the platform to do it.
(I hope I'm wrong about that. Debian kicks ass)
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Why not just download the compilers and math libs that have been ported from Tru64 to Linux?
Hmmm.... well, that's an idea. Although I'd still like to try Tru64.
--
Let's celebrate!!!
--
Here's my mirror
An S/390 the top of the range, market leading enterprise server.
where don't you see then in the F500?
accoring to computer associates: "International Data Corporation estimates that at least 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on OS/390 for their mission-critical business functions."
How about Nabisco, Charles Schwab, Merill Lynch, The US Postal Service, Motorola, Mazda and Bank of America for a start. S/390's are very serious pieces of kit.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
WTF? Since when is tftpd a "mission critical" service tftp is a great big security hole that most installs don't need and *should* be turned off by default. If you really do need it you will know how to turn it on if you don't need it it is better to have it turned off.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Frankly, if I owned a S/390, I wouldn't want to buy TurboLinux or SuSe for it. I wouldn't even want Redhat for it. I'd only be willing to run one that is endorsed and supported by IBM. Otherwise, why take the chance?
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
My wife is going to kill me when I bring a mainframe home...provided I can find one at a garage sale somewhere.
;)
Now I just need to find a map big enough for a 14,000-player Quake 3 CTF game.
Instead, they want an ISP to buy a 390 and pop a couple hundred Linux "servers" on it, each with their own wad of hosting accounts.
This might actually make sense, as if you're running a truly gigantic hosting farm then you're probably getting bit by MTBF on a regular basis. Using the 390 would significantly reduce your exposure to outages etc.
Now, since each Linux image would be a "real" server, even if it didn't exist in the physical world, the ISP could use their normal admins etc. -- they'd just need to hire somebody to run VM for them.
This way they can run monster hosting farms on reliable hardware, probably save a fortune in power requirements (one 390 vs. 300 PC-level boxen), and they don't have to all start learning VM or MVS.
It's obviously not for everyone, but I really do think it might be useful for lots of companies that wouldn't otherwise even think about mainframes.
I have no
Sure the idea of Linux being officially supported on Big Iron is very sexy. This will certainly get some media attention, and put the idea that "Linux isn't scalable" firmly into the grave.
However, there is a fundamental difference in philosphy between Linux sysadmins and mainframe operators. I think if and when we see large corporations adopt this, the sysadmins and operators will be at each other's throats. IBM is not going to be too forthcoming about opening things that they don't have to. The sizzle will disappear, and a few universities will have great fun with this but it won't catch on in the corporate arena.
HOWEVER, this is the Holy Grail for IBM. They can now effectively say they have a cross-platform OS that runs on everything from their PDA to the Big Iron and everything in between. Even in their wildest dreams, OS/2 wasn't supposed to ever be this portable. IBM is posturing itself to do something that no one else can: provide a complete end-to-end enterprise information infrastructure based on common tools cross-platform to reduce the need for sysadmins versed in multiple OS's. This concept won't necessarily sell big iron, but it WILL sell IBM.
Screw Micro$oft.
The S/390 is a big mainframe, correct? If so, then Linux on that thing is phat. Not as the main operating system, of course - but as another operating system running on the same machine. That's what so cool about these things - you can run several operating systems at the same time on the hardware. So you could have the main OS serving up huge databases or whatever and then have Linux with Apache serving up web pages, Samba serving up shares, etc. I want one.
--
The only major distributor that is missing here is Redhat.
;)
Does Debian have a proposed port? I'd love to load up Linux on my S/390 here at home... *dreaming*
eraseme
The only major distributor that is missing here is Redhat.
And Debian is not a major distribution? I think you should be a bit more impartial in your comments. "The only" is a quite strong expression.
If you're going to spend that much money on a box, then use the OS it was designed for. Thats great you can run 40,000 simultaneous copies of linux, but what happens when they actually start doing work? I seriously doubt its like having 40,000 seperate computers.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'm only playing Devil's advocate, but this sort of logic is only a small step away from that of people who think RedHat==Linux.
S/390? Big Deal... I don't see any of them in the Top500 list.
Where is the port for the SP/2?
> Apart from a few academics running dinosaur equipment, who cares?
Actually, mainframes are quite rare in academia, unless you want to count the registrar and business office. They are found most commonly in business environments: banks, corporate payroll systems, etc.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Apart from a few academics running dinosaur equipment, who cares?
I'll bet you think large companies do all their computing on PC's huh?
You'd be shocked to find that these machines are still being made, keeping up with the latest technology, and faster and more reliable than the best cluster systems.
Finkployd
Nobody is talking about porting mainframe apps to Linux.
The goal is to enable Internet applications on high performance, extremely reliable hardware. There's no Apache port for OS/390, but Apache can run on hundreds of Linux virtual machines on S390 hardware. It's a different way to achieve cluster reliability. IBM says throughput is higher and downtime and overall costs are reduced when compared to a cluster of Intel-based small servers.
It wasn't perfect - getting backspace-echo to work well on that sort of I/O controller just wasn't going to happen - but it was pretty close, and you could at least use vi. I was taking a compiler course at the time, doing a lot of compilation, and the choice of timesharing a Vax with ~40 people or using the Amdahl with ~2 people was pretty obvious
Why would you port Unix to Big Iron? Well, not only could you use the blazingly fast 10+ MIPS of CPU (when Vaxen were the canonical 1 MIPS), but more importantly, the distributed I/O architecture lets you do immense quantities of disk I/O to run databases. Not only is this Entertaining Research, but it was valuable for phone company billing and equipment-configuration-management applications, allowing more flexible Unix development environments, and it was a much better development environment that Vax-sized machines for the 5ESS phone switch development folks, who needed to compile and build programs that were huge then and large even today.
On the other hand, fsck took a *long* time to run, since the machines had a lot of disks, and this was back when Unix file systems really did need to be checked every time you booted
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How many people in the world will ever run linux on an S/390? How many people will ever even see an S/390?
This actually sounds like a good move. It would allow one of these big bank/insurance/investment/Mr. Burns-type organizations to save millions on hardware (a few of these and cheap dumb terminals) and software (no need for windows licensing).
I bet IBM offered SuSE a deal to do this, and it's a good move on their part if they did. IBM could sell a complete solution (including a mainframe with the old OS and one with the new stuff, then a bunch of terminals and a HUGE support contract) and Microsoft wouldn't see a dime in licensing.
-jpowers
-jpowers
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!?
> efforts such as the User Mode Kernel do not
> achieve quite the same results: the "partitions"
> or "user mode kernels" still share the same
> underlying kernel data structures. If one UMK
> craps out, it could potentially bring down the
> whole machine.
Wrong. If one umk craps out, it affects nothing else. Every umk has its own data structures, completely separate from every other kernel on the system.
Jeff
and it is kiddo. the point is, is that it should be available in the case that one _needs_ it, as my friend does. BTW, I never said "mission critical." You implied.
>whether the system will be reliable since it
>comes on tape.
>
> "I just used the CD record feature
>on my stereo" said Rob. "It works for music so
>why not data?"
60 minute audio tape on my TI99/4a.
Now I just feel old.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
"Mainframes are known for being very powerful (in IO speed, not necessarily CPU speed)"
This used to be true, with I/O devices directly connected running at channel speeds. However with the advent of cross-bar technology and SANS (12.6GB/s on a Starfire and 100MB/s full duplex disc access using fibre) it is true no longer. A big UNIX box can beat the pants off a mainframe in terms of CPU, I/O and cost.
Where UNIX doesn't come anywhere near the mainframe is in handling a complex workmix and availability. These are the major reasons why you find enterprises running online transaction processing on the mainframe and datawarehousing on a cheaper, more powerful box.
Cluster are catching up in speed, but have light years to go before hitting the reliability and stability of a big iron.
Finkployd
Large corporations running their payroll, insurance, banking systems *are not* going to migrate from the ridiculously reliable OS/390. That OS has been tested and tweaked for the past 30+ years and is state of near perfection.
What Linux on OS/390 is bringing is the possibility of running an ISP/ASP or an e-commerce hosting. S/390 and Linux, Apache, Perl, PHP, Zope, MySQL/PostgreSQL. If you shell out $2m for a beast of a mainframe, you can setup 20,000 virtual servers on it (twice more than that has already been done successfully), each running their own copy of Linux. It works out to about $1,000 per server, which will beat the shit out of any Intel based server with regards to performance or reliability, not to mention the price (can you say "five-fold"). As an added bonus, each of these 20,000 servers "sold" can be given full root privileges without fear of bringing down any other server if they screw up. Admins of those "rented" servers can install whatever software they like, do as they please.
Don't underestimate Big Blue, they thought this through many times over. I'm sure we'll see heck of a business plan unravelling soon.
Perhaps we're privilleged to be the historical witnesses of the computing revolution that is currently taking place, my dear fellow Slashdotters!
I have often wondered why IBM did not run everything possable under there manframe hardware. I was the administrator of a IBM 4381 running VM that I was able to discomision and the amount of IO was impressive even for that very small and week Mainframe. I think the new modle IBM is pushing is that a big company can have the best of all worlds. get rid of all of the PC and network and put it in the big blue box. You can invest in a IBM Mainfram and still run vm mvs os/360, OS/2, aix, Linux. Most mainfram engineers think they can do anything that a PC can do except get good press. From what I seen they ar right. This helps with the mainframs are uncool bad part of the pass Idea that a lot of windows and some unix people have even after they see hard facts showing cost, reliability, and performace superiority of big iron. The religion of the PC world is the OS not the hardware almost no one cares what the hard ware is as long as it is fast and stable and runs my OS native. This is why this is happing.
From a purely functional viewpoint the monopoly nukement trials seem to do chock piles of goodness. Look at IBM: it's grown to a very clever player from the ultimate bully. I think every sufficiently big power concentration (governmental/corporational/religious/whatever) should be limited like that; what do our liberalists think? The worst problem is that there should always be a bigger power establishing the limits :P
/. way ago), but large production deployment is only possible with official support.
Running Linux on IBM mainframes in their virtual-machine "userland" is nothing new in itself (was noticed on
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
At Linux PR you can read a bit about the e-commerce apps coming out for that environment.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Following the recent announcements that SuSE and TurboLinux will be releaseing Linux for the IBM S/390 and RedHat's release for the Itanium, Slackware have announced a release for the Commodore 64.
"It just seemed logical to go for a machine with a huge userbase." Said a spokesman with a funny last name who was probably called Rob or something. "Linux scales remarkable well to small machines. In fact much better than it does large servers."
Critics of the company are sceptical about whether the system will be reliable since it comes on tape.
"I just used the CD record feature on my stereo" said Rob. "It works for music so why not data?"
When asked whether a spectrumversion would be available, Rob said "It all depends on the success of this version. We're hoping to port it to all Z80 based machines, and possibly even pre-electronic machines".
Charles Babbage was not available for comment
> However, valuable as UMK is for some
> applications, it's (yet) not in the same league
> as mainframe partitioning.
True enough. I never claimed I was creating the next VM.
> UMKs, too, can be upgraded, but if the real
> kernel has to be upgraded, the whole
> machine goes down.
Yup. But if you ever have a setup where essentially everything is inside a UMK, and the hosting kernel is stripped down to the point that it's just providing processes, device drivers, and a filesystem, then you can run that forever, and just upgrade the UMKs.
> How well does the UMK protect the underlying
> real kernel (and thus other user-space apps)
> for excessive resource consumption? For
> example, what if an errant application running
> in an active UMK (or just buggy code in the
> kernel used by the UMK) starts spawning threads
> like crazy, will the UMK protect the rest of
> the real machine from adverse effects?
The UMK, just like a native kernel, runs in a constant amount of memory. You configure it with 64M, that's all it will ever use. You configure it with 4 processors, it will never have more than four processes running at once. So, you can protect the native kernel from excessive resource consumption by sticking things inside a virtual machine.
> The UMK kernel, valuable as it is, is still
> limited in it's ability to differ from the true
> underlying kernel.
No it's not.
> For example, can a kernel within a UMK provide a
> different thread-scheduling policy that the
> underlying real kernel?
You seem to think that the UMK is somehow not a full kernel. It is. The underlying kernel is just a provider of resources. If a new version of the kernel provided a funky new scheduling policy, UMK would support it, regardless of what is supported by the underlying kernel.
> However, my whole point is to emphasize how in
> IBM's mainframe environment complete isolation
> of distinct partitions is very easy
Yeah. Nothing comes close. Not even Linux plus UMK. Maybe this is a small step in that direction and maybe some people will find that useful, but there is a long way to go.
Jeff
http://www.s390.ibm.com/linux/
Browsing through the comments, it seems that most of the posters don't have a clue.
There are many applications for Linux on a S/390, not one of the least being the ability to provide thousands of virtual machines on one physical machine. Just think what this could do for the dedicated hardware web hosting business!
With an IBM S/390 I could provide all of the capabilities of the dedicated machine, including full root access to each user of a virtual machine, and I could do it for under $100 per month. I'd make a killing. I'm suprised someone hasn't already done it.
Anyway, here are some relevant links:Previous Slashdot articles:
OK, setting the "is this a worthwhile port" issues aside for a moment, should two separate teams even be working on this? It doesn't appear that TL and SuSE are exactly teaming up to tackle this. Does this mean that these ports won't be released as GPL? Or are they just trying to out do each other to say "we did it first"? Either way, this doesn't sound good to me...
Joe Wells
the no
Repeat after me, RedHat is not Mandrake. Mandrake is based on RedHat, but is very different. The Mandrake distro has several different packages to the RedHat distro it is based on, and Mandrake compile everything for Pentium optimisation. I really cannot see Mandrake branching into such radically new territory - they are far happy serving the (Pentium owning) mass market.
In this week's Computer Weekly (British IT trade newspaper) an IBM spokesman, Rich Lechner (Vice-President of e-business at IBM's enterprise systems group), is quoted as saying 'Linux opens the S/390 to a new generation of programming talent'. The tone of the article is that IBM is bringing software like Linux and Java to the S/390 because it is getting very difficult for S/390 users to recruit new programmers. This is an angle I haven't seen covered in all the articles that have tracked the progress of this on /.
As a programmer out of college for only a couple of years, I have always been interested in the big iron, but not enough to get skills that seem to be widely considered dead-end. I wouldn't mind writing Java to run on an S/390!
Our mainframe sysadmin's brother is running Linux on a vm on an S/390. She went to take a look and came back convinced. We'll soon have one for ourselves! This is *WAY* cool. Simple things like ftp'ing files to elsewhere are now a simple shell script away.
Or, how about a humongo *webserver*? Lessee, PHP, Sybase (yes, we're one of those shops)
Bwahahahahahaha...
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Yeah man. I love slack. You can't guess how many times a buddy of mine has asked for some help, or asked me to point him in the direction of a good (put app name here). I usually say "It's in the XYZ directory." "No it's not," he'll reply. I'll then say "Get a real dist." It's amazing that so many "big name" Linux distros (like Caldera, nudge, nudge) don't install by default critical services like tftpd. Duh!! I take so many things for granted that I assume other (li/*NUX) admins now where to find things. Duh me.
Bob