On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 08:23:27AM -0500, McKown, John wrote: > All the Linux/390 versions out there require a Generation 5 (-Rx6), > Generation 6 (-Rx7), or zArchitecture machine (z/800 or z/900). The older > generation 3 machines, which is what a -R14 is, do not have all the new > hardware instructions needed to run Linux/390. >
This is untrue. Linux will run just fine on G3s and G2s with the Halfword Immediate instructions--my P/390, a G2 machine, is perfectly capable of running Linux. IBM will, however, not support Linux in such a configuration. There are organizations that sell Linux support for these configurations, however. One thing to be aware of is that you do not get hardware IEEE floating point. Thus any Linux program that uses floating point support will be very slow, as it will have to go through the kernel emulation layer to do IEEE floating point. This is why, in my famous "cough syrup" benchmark, I found out just how painfully slow perl was on a P/390. Adam
