--- Matthew Emmerton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Robert Watson wrote:
On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Ken Bolingbroke wrote:
Long shot, probably, but I've got a bunch of
virtual machines on an IBM
S/390 mainframe, and while we're running SuSE
Linux on most of them, on
a whim I tossed out the idea of running FreeBSD
on one of them, and to
my surprise, it was taken seriously.
So, has anyone done any work with getting
FreeBSD running on a S/390?
What can I do to make it happen if there's
interest?
Well, as you've seen from the two responses
already, the implicit answer
to your question of "has anyone done any work"
appears to be "no" :-).
However, I think a number of us in the developer
community see this as a
fairly serious gap, and would like to remedy this.
However, IBM hasn't
been dropping S/390 machines and documentation in
anyone's laps (at least,
not mine, and no one else has mentioned it), so
the primary facilitators
would be, as with any new hardware port:
1) Access to necessary technical documentation and
expertise
2) Access to hardware
3) Someone with appropriate expertise willing the
guide ("own", if you
will) the port to the platform through to
completion, and continue to
provide on-going maintainership in the face of
adversity (someone adds
fine-grained SMP support and it falls on the
maintainer to figure out
how that works on their platform, if no one has
hardware).
Part of the "real answer" is probably that IBM or
a large consumer of
S/390 machines has to shepherd the whole process
to make it happen, and
that probably involves a moderate amount of money,
and moderate levels of
frustration. If you can provide access to the
first and survive the
second, then you can certainly make this a
reality. If not, well, it
would be nice to see it happen but the task is to
identify someone who can
provide these.
Well, I'm starting with IBM in May at their Toronto
Labs. All of my
managers were particularly interested in my
non-Linux open source activity
(what is this FreeBSd thing that you talk about?)
I'm not promising anything, but I too would *love*
to get IBM supporting
FreeBSD in some way. Perhaps a version of JFS
released under the BSD
licence would be a start, and then hardware support
for RS/6k and S/390.
I will keep my eyes and ears open for anything
useful that falls my way.
--
Matt Emmerton
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Well, I work for IBM for 4 years, and at one time they
did not know what Linux was. I run freebsd at work on
my workstation, and have to pass it off as a "linux
distribution" in order for people to understand what
it is. Some interesting news is that in front of the
IBM building here in austin they raised a flag that
said "Peace, Love, and linux".
So go figure. Linux seems to have more talk internally
than actual use. But given how big IBM is it is hard
to say what any other part of it is doing.
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