Slashdot Mirror
Linux's Open Mainframe Project Announces Areas of Focus (sdtimes.com)
New submitter mmoorebz writes: The Linux Foundation is announcing new areas of focus for its Open Mainframe Project. The Open Mainframe Project is a collaborative effort launched six months ago as a focal point for the deployment and use of the Linux OS on the mainframe.
What hardware are they focusing on? Vax11? IBM 360?
Is it just me or is there something serious missing here?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Several years ago my apartment complex in Silicon Valley had a gather your recyclables event at the leasing office and the flyer had a detailed list of what was acceptable to turn. I noticed mainframe on the list. Alas, no one put a mainframe out for pickup.
They have Linux partitions on their OS/390 mainframes. It's been a while since I last touched it (must have been 12 years ago or so?), and it was behaving quite odd at the time (not many utilities, strange idea of what root constituted, and that horrible, horrible shell), but still... the idea is a bit older than today.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
This could be the year of Linux on the Mainframe.
Lorem ipsum, man, lorem ipsum.
IBM is what they're targeting. It's a laundry list of tech improvements Linux on the Mainframe that are, let's face it Mainframe/IBM specific.
JIT for OpenJDK, where the project will work on adding JIT support to the z port of OpenJDK.
Docker support to enhance Docker for highly available virtualized systems and mainframe computing environments.
Blockchain support that will focus on performance and improvements to the Hyperledger Project, and will target Linux on the mainframe.
Assessment and certification of Linux monitoring tools.
Acceptances of the anomaly detection engine for Linux logs.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Is there a compelling reason to prefer Linux to the BSDs when it comes to the mainframe? I know none of the mainframes had Unix running on them, but AIX was ported to some of them.
Now I know AIX was based on System V rather than BSD, but does it have more similarities to Linux than it does to BSD?
The current mainframe operating system, z/OS, is a combination of AIX and MVS so it can run traditional mainframe programs alongside unix programs in the same OS.
Is there a compelling reason to prefer Linux to the BSDs when it comes to the mainframe?
Well, there's the fact that the mainframe manufacturers (read: IBM) actively support Linux on their systems, and will happily sell you a mainframe with Linux pre-installed. In fact, that's more-or-less the standard configuration these days, as I understand it. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/...
I know none of the mainframes had Unix running on them [...]
Your knowledge is extremely out of date. RH, SUSE, and even Debian have been actively supporting IBM mainframes for years, with active help and support from IBM. Linux has been running on mainframes in datacenters for over a decade.
does [AIX] have more similarities to Linux than it does to BSD?
While this is a less relevant question than you thought, the answer is still yes. Linux—or, more specifically, GNU—generally steered a middle course between SysV and BSD, and, where it could, would implement compatibility with both. So, overall, Linux—or, at least, the flavor of Linux sometimes referred to as "GNU/Linux"—is closer to both SysV and BSD than either is to the other. (Although the differences between BSD and SysV have also diminished over time as BSD has adapted to become more flexible itself.)
I can't find the original article I read where in the late 90's an IBM employee worked out how to partition a mainframe for Linux. But they did offer it and actually helped get Linux accepted as many began to say "If IBM backs it it must be good". The best link I could find on this is from 2001:
https://books.google.com/books...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The project also announced a great internship program, helping pair students with mentors with deep mainframe experience to help build the open source platform.
https://wiki.linuxfoundation.o...
still can't play a F&%$%^@@g video without tearing!
CAP == 'ipod'
The smallest zMachine last time I checked was 16GB RAM and cost over $50k. You can get fucked with that pricing.
They are *mainframes* they are hardly comparable to desktop PCs.
They do not compete on total RAM or total CPU power. They compete on bus, interconnects, I/O bandwidth, I/O Coprocessors, etc.
In other words, its not the total number of GiB or FLOPS that make them expensive.
It's the fact that you can - e.g. - take thoese GiB and FLOPS, partition them into 200 instances, run 200x Linux installation on them, and each will be guaranteed access to at least 1/200th of the GiB and FLOPS with no overhead, despite the 199 instance running nearby.
Another way to put it: if you want to buld to the same specs out of commodity x86 hardware, it's also going to cost you around $50k not because of the RAM modules or the CPUs, but because of the highend Infiniband fabric that you'll need to put between your nodes to reach the same IO perfs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Aside from making it easier to port software TO the mainframe, IBM has priced additional capacity *limited to running Linux* much cheaper than native z/OS. So IBM mainframe shops have a strong incentive to add incremental workloads on Linux.