Sun Bashes Linux on (IBM) Mainframes

dagbrown writes: "An article linked from Sun's front page, entitled "Linux on the mainframe: Not a good idea" by Shahin Khan, Sun's chief competitive officer, has the interesting theory that Linux on mainframes makes no sense because, among other things, the VM/Linux combo isn't a very good match. What do the folks on Slashdot think?"

Comments

Hey - me too!

[SubtleNuance]

And it was a seriously easy. There were never a problem with the virtual machine suddenly giving up the ghost from underneath us, and we'd never loose a Samba process for any reason whatsoever. We had load averages that were very normal, and it was like we were always scrambling to find new reasons to use it, as opposed to setting it up and just having forgetting about it. We used to tell the students that the machine was seriously hot, and it would never fall-over. We were even thinking of doing up artwork -- AND STARTING A RELIGION!


All those impressive demos where they have 32 hojillion instances of linux running on a mainframe are so meaningfull. Sure, you can do without it, but it will do everything. If you try actually working with the setup, you never have to reboot your machine -- instead of doing it 10 times a day, and those other take forever to freakin' reboot.

But who are you going to believe, ummm, me or ummmmm, that other guy.

Sheesh.

Re:I actually worked on Linux on a Mainframe...

[darkonc]

We used to tell the students that the machine had caught on fire and had (literally) fallen over.

I gotta hunt down and re-digitize the video that a set of students did back in 1992. At that time the UBC Computer Science GraFic lab had a stack of IBM RS-6000 computers running AIX (which I sometimes pronounced 'aches') which tended to crash far too often.

For their animation lab one group's video was an RS6000 shaking, smoking and melting down into a grave with (computerized) flowers sticking out of it and a gravestone blinking 888 (which the 3-digit LED display would do after a general system panic)

With later versions of AIX and some coddling from your's truely, I was able to make the IBMs a good bit more stable -- but never quite as rock-solid as the SGIs running IRIX -- and they never really outlived their reputation.

Then, of course, there was the obligatory IBM PC... Let's just say it was really good for running Castle Wolfenstein (the original).