Somebody announces something awesome, and the actual developers show up in the comment thread further enhancing the awesome, and now I have to go download some stuff and try things out just for the hell of it.
It only talks about virtualization as it exists on Intel hardware? What about Power LPAR? What about Solaris Zones? What about mainframes? How can it be called an overview when it only touches on a third of whats out there?
I'd guess cause thats what the author could get for free in the 10 minutes it took to write that article.
It's 50% assembly and 50% PLI. What the hell are you going to do with it? It's not like you can port it to anything, and for customization theres user exit hooks in the code at every interesting point anyway.
The only possible reasons I can think of are:
a) education purposes: at least 80% of the code is recovery routines. Learn how to do it right...
Long answer: Despite the fact that Linux is Linux - you'll probably find that getting WebSphere to run on Debian could be nigh-impossible. DB2 might run ok, maybe the Tivoli thing too, as long as it's not using Java.
The big catch is Java ( well, DB2 also, but to a lesser extent than Java ) - JVMs dig pretty deep into the glibc libraries and kernel calls, and getting a JVM to run 100% correctly on any given kernel/glibc combination takes gobs and gobs and gobs of effort. Hence - companies only support specific distros at specific library levels.
By all means - contact your friendly IBM support person and let them know that you want to run that stuff on Debian. The only way it will ever happen is if enough folks pester them into doing it. I don't mean pester ie: Support Debian you bastards! Something more like: We want to run this list of products {a b c} on Debian. We would pay this { X } much money for the ability to do that.
But - IBM being the behemoth it is, such a change can take a long time even with persistant effort from the users.
Basically - IBM is not officially going to support you running on Debian. If you wave enough money under your IBM sales critter's nose, he/she may be able to work you a deal to get it up and running or something, but it will not be full Debian support nirvana.
So in the short term, use a supported distro if you want official support.
It seems like the 3Dmark folks decided to deliberately test DX9 features, even though there are not many cards which support them in hardware yet. Nvidia is pissed because they have not implemented any DX9 features in hardware on the FX, where ATI has them on the 9x00 whatever.
This is a valid benchmark to use to test out how your current hardware will perform in a DX9 environment. I, for one, am glad to see such a tool available so that I can take DX9 performance into account when making my next video card purchase. So my next card may be an ATI - Who knew? The last ATI product I owned was a Number 9, not exactly a 3D monster....
It's a PC you can use to drive keyboard / mouse input into another system. It comes with a video capture card to read the output and make decisions about whether the test was successful or not.
It's fully scriptable using a c-ish syntax, and comes with a nice IDE and runtime environment to get the work done. It seems like it may be a nice match for what you want to do.
The number I've heard is ~400k for a z800 for running linux only under VM - No z/OS or z/OS.e
That system will certainly be able to host those 40 services. Hmmm. Now that I think about it, I think that 400k is for a fully configured z800 with 4 processors and lots o RAM. From what I've seen, it's got quite a bit of zoot. Probably enough for at least 100 such infrastructure machines.
It talks over ESCON or FICON, whatever you have. SCSI is not there yet, but they demo'ed a z800 at linux world with SCSI attached CD-ROMs and other fun stuff. It's all in here:
mplinux1:/usr/src/linux/drivers/s390/block # uname -a Linux mplinux1 2.2.16 #1 SMP Fri Mar 23 06:25:46 EST 2001 s390 unknown
He basically has 1 valid point. Linux under VM is not as well behaved as it should be, for exactly the reason mentioned. Coming from the PC world where all hardware is real, it treats all memory as if there isn't anything else better to do that use it all for file buffers. Under VM, a better plan is to check to see if there is any memory pressure being exerted on the machine before using your entire memory allocation for buffering.
They're working on that.
As for the rest, it's mostly FUD. The endian-ness is not an issue for 95% (wild ass guess) of apps that I have seen. Maybe except for DB2. You have to plan your maximum capacity in a discrete server farm just like you do in a virtual one. You also get capacity upgrade on demand with a phone call with the IBM hardware. They dont even have to send out a CE to do anything. Let's see SUN do that.
You wouldn't want to use it as a compute farm, but as a database server or news server or something which is usually I/O bound. They ain't exactly ferraris, more like 18 wheeler big rigs.
I imagine you're running on a MP3000 machine - It's like 2 feet high and 2 feet wide by 4 feet deep, right? Yeah - those are basically a PC with 2 S/390 processors strapped on the side. And yes, if you reboot the PC, the entire system goes down. (Just did that once this week as a matter of fact. I was trying to get to a task list a la NT and did a ctrl-alt-del. Imagine my suprise at the System Rebooting message... Been a while since I used OS/2 )
The battling tape robots actually happened. There was one model of this library I think in the late 70's or early 80's which had one failure mode where the two arms would get out of sync and start throwing tape cartridges at each other. Dont remember the model number, but the tapes were held in tubes a little bigger than a D cell battery. About as heavy too, made a really loud THUNK sound as they went whipping about the room...
Yeah, someone was thinking about that on the Linux/s390 list too. It would be nice for some low-bandwidth workloads like disk backups and personal storage. The Fiber I/O is the tough part - I dont think theres a FICON adapter for the PCI bus yet. Maybe the one from the Shark system could be adapted? Would be cool.....
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody announces something awesome, and the actual developers show up in the comment thread further enhancing the awesome, and now I have to go download some stuff and try things out just for the hell of it.
It's like Slashdot Circa 1998. Crazy.
Hey you kids! Git offen mah lawn!
Backward Compatibility: Running your COBOL written in 1971 on the current release of z/OS without changes.
FYI: the hardware architecture has gone through 2 addressing mode changes since then - from 24, to 31, and now 64 bit addressing.
It only talks about virtualization as it exists on Intel hardware? What about Power LPAR? What about Solaris Zones? What about mainframes? How can it be called an overview when it only touches on a third of whats out there?
I'd guess cause thats what the author could get for free in the 10 minutes it took to write that article.
3. mvs/zos/s390 -- and related software
???
For the love of god, WHY?
It's 50% assembly and 50% PLI. What the hell are you going to do with it? It's not like you can port it to anything, and for customization theres user exit hooks in the code at every interesting point anyway.
The only possible reasons I can think of are:
a) education purposes: at least 80% of the code is recovery routines. Learn how to do it right...
b) to resell it
Why would you want a 5 digit login? :)
Short answer: Go with a supported distro instead.
Long answer: Despite the fact that Linux is Linux - you'll probably find that getting WebSphere to run on Debian could be nigh-impossible. DB2 might run ok, maybe the Tivoli thing too, as long as it's not using Java.
The big catch is Java ( well, DB2 also, but to a lesser extent than Java ) - JVMs dig pretty deep into the glibc libraries and kernel calls, and getting a JVM to run 100% correctly on any given kernel/glibc combination takes gobs and gobs and gobs of effort. Hence - companies only support specific distros at specific library levels.
By all means - contact your friendly IBM support person and let them know that you want to run that stuff on Debian. The only way it will ever happen is if enough folks pester them into doing it. I don't mean pester ie: Support Debian you bastards! Something more like: We want to run this list of products {a b c} on Debian. We would pay this { X } much money for the ability to do that.
But - IBM being the behemoth it is, such a change can take a long time even with persistant effort from the users.
Basically - IBM is not officially going to support you running on Debian. If you wave enough money under your IBM sales critter's nose, he/she may be able to work you a deal to get it up and running or something, but it will not be full Debian support nirvana.
So in the short term, use a supported distro if you want official support.
Cause CMS sucks a$$ for doing real work?
That's like bitching that someone is running Linux when they could be running DOS. I like DOS as much as the next guy, but come on....
Actually, since Amdahl/Fujitsu and Hitachi have mostly gotten out of the business, IBM *IS* the mainframe market.
And don't spew any of that crap about the E10K or SuperDome being a mainframe. They're not. Despite what the shiny brochure says, they're not.
Actually - vi runs nicely under OMVS (Open MVS - basically a UNIX kernel ish interface to the MVS system with a complete posix userland & filesystem)
Different? Whoooooo yeah. I've been here 3 years and I still learn something basic every day.
It seems like the 3Dmark folks decided to deliberately test DX9 features, even though there are not many cards which support them in hardware yet. Nvidia is pissed because they have not implemented any DX9 features in hardware on the FX, where ATI has them on the 9x00 whatever.
This is a valid benchmark to use to test out how your current hardware will perform in a DX9 environment. I, for one, am glad to see such a tool available so that I can take DX9 performance into account when making my next video card purchase. So my next card may be an ATI - Who knew? The last ATI product I owned was a Number 9, not exactly a 3D monster....
> imagine... a Beuwolf cluster of s/390s
That's called Parallel Sysplex.
I think the XML parser comes as a seperate FMID - do a search for HXML120 on the IBM home page.
It's a PC you can use to drive keyboard / mouse input into another system. It comes with a video capture card to read the output and make decisions about whether the test was successful or not.
It's fully scriptable using a c-ish syntax, and comes with a nice IDE and runtime environment to get the work done. It seems like it may be a nice match for what you want to do.
Here is more info.
The number I've heard is ~400k for a z800 for running linux only under VM - No z/OS or z/OS.e
That system will certainly be able to host those 40 services. Hmmm. Now that I think about it, I think that 400k is for a fully configured z800 with 4 processors and lots o RAM. From what I've seen, it's got quite a bit of zoot. Probably enough for at least 100 such infrastructure machines.
It talks over ESCON or FICON, whatever you have. SCSI is not there yet, but they demo'ed a z800 at linux world with SCSI attached CD-ROMs and other fun stuff. It's all in here:
b lock #
mplinux1:/usr/src/linux/drivers/s390/block # uname -a
Linux mplinux1 2.2.16 #1 SMP Fri Mar 23 06:25:46 EST 2001 s390 unknown
mplinux1:/usr/src/linux/drivers/s390/block # ls *.c
dasd.c dasd_9336_erp.c dasd_eckd.c mdisk.c
dasd_3370_erp.c dasd_9343_erp.c dasd_eckd_erp.c xpram.c
dasd_3990_erp.c dasd_diag.c dasd_fba.c
mplinux1:/usr/src/linux/drivers/s390/
Both endians?
Schweet! I dunno if I believe it, but it's still a really cool idea.
He basically has 1 valid point. Linux under VM is not as well behaved as it should be, for exactly the reason mentioned. Coming from the PC world where all hardware is real, it treats all memory as if there isn't anything else better to do that use it all for file buffers. Under VM, a better plan is to check to see if there is any memory pressure being exerted on the machine before using your entire memory allocation for buffering.
They're working on that.
As for the rest, it's mostly FUD. The endian-ness is not an issue for 95% (wild ass guess) of apps that I have seen. Maybe except for DB2. You have to plan your maximum capacity in a discrete server farm just like you do in a virtual one. You also get capacity upgrade on demand with a phone call with the IBM hardware. They dont even have to send out a CE to do anything. Let's see SUN do that.
You wouldn't want to use it as a compute farm, but as a database server or news server or something which is usually I/O bound. They ain't exactly ferraris, more like 18 wheeler big rigs.
**queen riff**
Another one bites the dust...
I imagine you're running on a MP3000 machine - It's like 2 feet high and 2 feet wide by 4 feet deep, right? Yeah - those are basically a PC with 2 S/390 processors strapped on the side. And yes, if you reboot the PC, the entire system goes down. (Just did that once this week as a matter of fact. I was trying to get to a task list a la NT and did a ctrl-alt-del. Imagine my suprise at the System Rebooting message... Been a while since I used OS/2 )
Yeah - but the cake was kinda nasty in my opinion. Maybe yours wasn't all dry and stuff.
It was nice to get the free coffee though.
The battling tape robots actually happened. There was one model of this library I think in the late 70's or early 80's which had one failure mode where the two arms would get out of sync and start throwing tape cartridges at each other. Dont remember the model number, but the tapes were held in tubes a little bigger than a D cell battery. About as heavy too, made a really loud THUNK sound as they went whipping about the room...
>>The original Linux was like a Datsun 240Z
Damn Straight, I've got one of those! That car rules!
Jay
Yeah, someone was thinking about that on the Linux/s390 list too. It would be nice for some low-bandwidth workloads like disk backups and personal storage. The Fiber I/O is the tough part - I dont think theres a FICON adapter for the PCI bus yet. Maybe the one from the Shark system could be adapted? Would be cool.....
LOL
But who will you steal more secrets from then?
Hmmm?
It's iiiiiBot, it's iiiiiBot,
It's such a roboty toy!
It's fun for a girl or a boy!
It's fun for a girl or a boy!