> It sounds like an interesting interface, but I'm curious:
> Can you tell me what the implication of this is?
> What type of features/functions would this assist in?

It is mainly useful for designing virtual machine appliances that
augment existing virtual machine workloads in various interesting ways.
Some of the problems have been with interfacing to classic VM features
using supported interfaces -- several people have written private
versions, but this one is actually in the mainline code tree, so we
don't have to maintain it or support it; it's just there. It also
enables support for driving the VM native spooling system devices from
Linux, leveraging the kind of things you can do with Linux as a
replacement for CMS.

For example, the VM SMTP server has been lagging along for ages, both in
function and other ways. This would allow replacing it directly with a
Exim or Postfix based Linux solution that still accepted and generated
PUNCH files in the same way that VM SMTP has always worked. We did
something like this a while back with a privately written device driver;
now we could submit the changes to Exim and have it directly supported
as an input channel in the open source code. 

You could also finally drive CP-attached line printers with CUPS (not
that you can do much with them, but they'd work). You could write your
own NJE service to replace RSCS and still handle spool files the same
way RSCS does. 

Lots of interesting possibilities open up when there's a directly
supported way of accomplishing this task. 

-- db




> 
> thanks.
> 
> 
> 
> David Boyes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Date:         Tue, 17 Jul
2007
> 10:26:34 -0400
> From: David Boyes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: VM unit record device driver submitted to Linus
> To: [email protected]
> 
>  Worthy of note...
> 
> 
> 
> Included in a recent list of patches submitted for 2.6 kernels:
> 
> 
> 
> > z/VM Unit record character device driver to access VM reader, punch,
> 
> > and printer.
> 
> 
> 
> Not available in any distribution yet (coming soon for
testing/unstable
> in Debian etch), but very promising.
> 
> 
> 
> -- db
> 
> 
> 
> 
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