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.

Comments

A Linux Mainframe?

[bobbied]

What hardware are they focusing on? Vax11? IBM 360?

Is it just me or is there something serious missing here?

Re:A Linux Mainframe?

[__aaclcg7560]

[..] it makes not much sense to install a hobbyist operating system [...]

We're not talking about Microsoft Windows.

Re:A Linux Mainframe?

[mwvdlee]

Yeah, who needs a mainframe when you can just as easily install Linux on your typical 100 CPU, 3TB RAM server from Dell.

Re:A Linux Mainframe?

[naris]

OS 360 was superseded by MVS in the late 60s / early 70s, which was superseded by OS/390 in the 90s which was then superseded by z/OS (which combines OS/390/MVS with AIX/unix). Linux can be run as it's own OS under the VM hyperviser, right along with z/OS (also running under VM). Often you will find several (up to a couple thousand) instances of Linux running in VM, perhaps along with an instance or 2 of z/OS.

So I need is a mainframe...

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Linux

[ardmhacha]

This could be the year of Linux on the Mainframe.

Re:Linux, AIX & BSD

[Xtifr]

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Your knowledge is extremely out of date.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.)

Mainframe

[DrYak]

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.