On Wed, Jun 1, 2016, at 11:39, R P Herrold wrote: > > IBM upstream has moved the 'enterprise' distributions to the > even later z196 level about three years ago, via the -march > option. They made no secret of their intention to 'end the > life' of earlier hardware main-line support, even if it was > not well communicated outside of 'enterprise' circles > > One could speculate why, but ... why bother. Chopping off the > legacy tail gets rid of easy conversions and substitution > replacement by Hercules rather than zPDT, and so drives more > of the remaining 'paying customer' pot either off of Z (to > Power, or distributed)
Less than a year ago, I reported a problem to IBM regarding a kernel crash on pre-z10 processors, and they produced a fix for it. (See https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/s390/linux.git/patch/?id=0b991f5cdcd6201e5401f83ca3a672343c3bfc49.) So, for Linux they are still supporting the entire z/Architecture line. Of course, it's no secret that they want their customers to keep buying their newer models every few years. For their own proprietary 64-bit operating systems, such as z/VM, they start cutting off older hardware. We still run z/VM 5.4.0 because it is the last release of z/VM that still supports our z/890. Starting with z/VM 6.1.0, a z10 or newer is required. -- .''`. Stephen Powell <zlinux...@fastmail.com> : :' : `. `'` `-