On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Adam Thornton <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Mar 23, 2009, at 4:58 PM, Andrew Wiley wrote: > > Okay, you've given me a lot to consider. >> My first question is about Linux/390. I'm an avid linux user and I >> assumed >> from my experiences that the difference in underlying platforms is >> handled >> entirely by the kernel; userspace programs, with only a few >> exceptions, >> compile and operate similarly no matter the platform. The comments I'm >> reading here seem to imply that this isn't the case. >> > > They're wrong. > > From a non-root-userspace perspective, mainframe Linux is Linux. > Period. > Well, that's probably my fault for not making it clear that I primarily wanted to run linux VM's, but that clears things up quite a bit. > > Also, I'm not sure why the Hercules emulator keeps being recommended >> as an >> alternative to mainframe linux. Do linux installations in LPAR's on >> Hercules >> perform better than existing linux virtual machines, or am I missing >> something else obvious? >> > > No. If your goal is "a Linux machine" a virtualized Linux that > doesn't require processor emulation is a better use of your cycles. > > If your goal is to play with a mainframe Linux, then maybe not...for > what you want to do, though, it sounds like Linux, rather than > particular-architecture Linux, is what you want. In which case, > virtualize the native hardware. This is pretty much true. If we wound up using a mainframe, we would try to add mainframe programming to the possible independent study courses, but the immediate goal is to get a better way to run servers than collecting old desktop hardware. Once again, I probably should have made that more clear. > If you can get your hands on a mainframe, some disk, a reasonably > decent network interface, and z/VM 4.4, you might find it worthwhile > to run Linux boxes under z/VM. The last one of those is going to be > the tricky part. 4.3 would be OK, but prior to partway-through-4.2 > you couldn't really do guest LANs effectively, which in turn mean that > networking your penguins becomes really much more irritating than you > want. > > Okay, so I guess I'll say we're interested and ask for more information. Assuming that several minor miracles occur, including that the mainframe has at least most of the hardware required to actually run it, the company will transfer a license to an installation of the right version of VM, the power usage isn't too astronomical, the technical specs are at least decent, I could wind up with a decently stable system to run linux server VM's. I'll see what happens. Thanks for the help, it's been very... helpful? I would still be wandering around Google search results if not for this mailing list. Andrew ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
