Linux's Open Mainframe Project Announces Areas of Focus (sdtimes.com) 47
New submitter mmoorebz writes: The Linux Foundation is announcing new areas of focus for its Open Mainframe Project. The Open Mainframe Project is a collaborative effort launched six months ago as a focal point for the deployment and use of the Linux OS on the mainframe.
A Linux Mainframe? (Score:3)
What hardware are they focusing on? Vax11? IBM 360?
Is it just me or is there something serious missing here?
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IBM is still making new mainframes. With all those obsolete mainframes collecting dust in the back office, it makes sense to repurpose them with Linux.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-unveils-mainframe-encrypted-hybrid-050100233.html [yahoo.com]
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[..] it makes not much sense to install a hobbyist operating system [...]
We're not talking about Microsoft Windows.
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But creimer said they are making new mainframes, and those ain't necessarily power hogs. They could easily have several times the performance and several times less power, given all the process shrinks they've gone thru.
Only question - whether Linux would need to have compatibility w/ OS 360 or other legacy mainframe OSs, or whether the applications that ran on those would run natively on Linux?
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Yeah, who needs a mainframe when you can just as easily install Linux on your typical 100 CPU, 3TB RAM server from Dell.
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More like who needs a Mainframe when you can just as easily install Linux on your typical 64 CPU 8TB POWER8 from IBM or whatever shit Sun^W Oracle is selling.
Get this, the largest IBM POWER system is more powerful and capable, not to mention faster than the biggest zSeries. The only people running Linux on Mainframes are idiots and people who already have a big Mainframe for some massive legacy application like SABRE or TPF; because you can have much faster communication between a Linux VM and z/OS or z/TPF than you can over external cabling.
Hmm, I don't agree with that comment. There are many I/O intensive jobs that Z architecture makes much more sense for than POWER or x86. Think real time big data analytics, financial services, etc. You can run TCO simulations where Z cost less that POWER or x86 in no time.
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Back when Sun was still in the computer business, and making noise about their hardware taking out mainframes around the world, guess what - Sun ran their business on, you guessed it, mainframes.
Fast-forward to today, Mainframes are still around, and Sun is now a small portion of Oracle's business.
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Yeah, who needs a mainframe when you can just as easily install Linux on your typical 100 CPU, 3TB RAM server from Dell.
Can you replace a faulty CPU in the Dell while it's running?
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Whoosh
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Didn't IBM already do this? (Score:2)
I can't find the original article I read where in the late 90's an IBM employee worked out how to partition a mainframe for Linux. But they did offer it and actually helped get Linux accepted as many began to say "If IBM backs it it must be good". The best link I could find on this is from 2001:
https://books.google.com/books... [google.com]
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Why would you?
Linux was ported to mainframes in 1998. [wikipedia.org]
Linux
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What hardware are they focusing on? Vax11? IBM 360?
Is it just me or is there something serious missing here?
You do realise that those machines are circa 1970's and rightfully belong in a museum. You would be really hard pressed getting parts for them.
If you want older still usable machines I suppose you could look at the HP9000 series (still being made) or the IBM 7026-6m1 which was the last IBM machine I worked on in 2004 yet is still usable today. The IBM machines even in 2004 were very capable of running Redhat or CentOS Linux in an LPAR.
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What hardware are they focusing on? Vax11? IBM 360?
Shooting from the hip, but to me a mainframe is not the same as "a huge computer"; I know some people think it is. Mainframes tend to be engineered for reliability more than anything else, as well as for fast i/o; they are usually rather specialised computers in many ways. The OS often seems a bit simplified compared to Linux, Windows or OS/X.
It also often surprises people that many of the hot, new features we are still getting used to started their lives in mainframes: virtual machines is one that springs
So I need is a mainframe... (Score:3)
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I once had some folks drop a PDP-11/23 on my porch, ring the doorbell, and run away.
My father did that to me by abandoning his old car in my carport and calling me to wish me a happy birthday. I spent the next three years having the mechanic fix all the problems that my DIY father fixed but didn't tell me about, and junked the car two years later when the alternator finally gave up the ghost.
IBM already does it (Score:2)
They have Linux partitions on their OS/390 mainframes. It's been a while since I last touched it (must have been 12 years ago or so?), and it was behaving quite odd at the time (not many utilities, strange idea of what root constituted, and that horrible, horrible shell), but still... the idea is a bit older than today.
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They have Linux partitions on their OS/390 mainframes. It's been a while since I last touched it (must have been 12 years ago or so?), and it was behaving quite odd at the time (not many utilities, strange idea of what root constituted, and that horrible, horrible shell),
Are you thinking of Linux partitions or of UNIX System Services [ibm.com] for OS/390 (and z/OS)? The former is Real Live Linux running as an OS; the latter is an add-on environment for MVS and its successors, providing some level of POSIX/Single UNIX Specification compatibility, but with, for example, EBCDIC rather than ASCII as its character set.
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UNIX System Services [ibm.com] for OS/390 (and z/OS)?
I remember fiddling around with USS a bit on zOS. Kind of strange, but you could actually do some things once in a while that way that were much easier than trying to destroy one's brain on the twisted mess called JCL.
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You're right. I was thinking of USS.
Linux (Score:5, Funny)
This could be the year of Linux on the Mainframe.
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That could have been funny.... ...except most new System Z are sold with full Linux support. Telia (Swedish TelCo) said about 10 years ago: "Why run Linux on x86 when we can run 2000 Linux instances on the smallest System Z?"
Mainframe (Score:5, Interesting)
The smallest zMachine last time I checked was 16GB RAM and cost over $50k. You can get fucked with that pricing.
They are *mainframes* they are hardly comparable to desktop PCs.
They do not compete on total RAM or total CPU power. They compete on bus, interconnects, I/O bandwidth, I/O Coprocessors, etc.
In other words, its not the total number of GiB or FLOPS that make them expensive.
It's the fact that you can - e.g. - take thoese GiB and FLOPS, partition them into 200 instances, run 200x Linux installation on them, and each will be guaranteed access to at least 1/200th of the GiB and FLOPS with no overhead, despite the 199 instance running nearby.
Another way to put it: if you want to buld to the same specs out of commodity x86 hardware, it's also going to cost you around $50k not because of the RAM modules or the CPUs, but because of the highend Infiniband fabric that you'll need to put between your nodes to reach the same IO perfs.
Re:Linux, AIX & BSD (Score:2)
Is there a compelling reason to prefer Linux to the BSDs when it comes to the mainframe? I know none of the mainframes had Unix running on them, but AIX was ported to some of them.
Now I know AIX was based on System V rather than BSD, but does it have more similarities to Linux than it does to BSD?
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Is there a compelling reason to prefer Linux to the BSDs when it comes to the mainframe?
Well, there's the fact that the mainframe manufacturers (read: IBM) actively support Linux on their systems, and will happily sell you a mainframe with Linux pre-installed. In fact, that's more-or-less the standard configuration these days, as I understand it. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/... [ibm.com]
I know none of the mainframes had Unix running on them [...]
Your knowledge is extremely out of date. RH, SUSE, and even Debian have been actively supporting IBM mainframes for years, with active help and support from IBM. Linux has been running on mainframes in datacenters for
Re:Linux, AIX & BSD .. and vs. native z/OS (Score:2)
Aside from making it easier to port software TO the mainframe, IBM has priced additional capacity *limited to running Linux* much cheaper than native z/OS. So IBM mainframe shops have a strong incentive to add incremental workloads on Linux.
mainframes being (Score:2)
IBM is what they're targeting. It's a laundry list of tech improvements Linux on the Mainframe that are, let's face it Mainframe/IBM specific.
JIT for OpenJDK, where the project will work on adding JIT support to the z port of OpenJDK.
Docker support to enhance Docker for highly available virtualized systems and mainframe computing environments.
Blockchain support that will focus on performance and improvements to the Hyper
Also look at the internship program (Score:2)
The project also announced a great internship program, helping pair students with mentors with deep mainframe experience to help build the open source platform.
https://wiki.linuxfoundation.o... [linuxfoundation.org]