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IBM Ports Linux to S/390 113

Posted by CmdrTaco from the big-honkin-linux-ports dept.
smoon writes "The most expensive Linux platform available? IBM appears to be working on a port of Linux to S/390." First version is running on a VM. Second version will be running on 'Bare Metal' as they call it. Pretty cool if you happen to have a 390 sitting around somewhere ;)
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IBM Ports Linux to S/390 More

IBM Ports Linux to S/390

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  • Didn't this get posted about 2 weeks ago?

  • Intriguing! (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <(imipak) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Monday November 29, 1999 @08:00AM (#1496311) Homepage Journal
    This was rumoured, maybe 6 months ago, with stronger rumours maybe 2 weeks ago. If these rumours actually turn out to be real, this will be one of the most amazing Linux platforms out there. At least, until the Transmeta arch gets integrated. :)

    Seriously, though, if IBM produce an official, supported version for their medium or high-end hardware, Linux will start to be taken a WHOLE lot more seriously by the pointy-hair guys.

    (After all, nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM, right...? :)

  • Can IBM support both Linux and Monterrey going forward ? Should they ?
  • My head is spinning.

    Linux under a VM for fast porting of Linux apps I can understand -- but Linux on bare mainframe metal? I'm a big Linux fan, but there's no way Linux can be optimal in an environment like this.

    Sure it's cool, but is there a point other than hack value?

    Is this a publicity stunt to send the message that IBM is your Open Source Friend, or perhaps to send the message that MS is flanked on both ends?


  • Good example of how Linux can help business. (Score:3)

    by Dast ( 10275 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @08:12AM (#1496319)
    I think this is an great example of how Linux can be good for business. IBM can benefit by allowing customers to run Domino on mainframes, and the community benefits from the kernel source that IBM would release. Not only that, but IBM bolsters their image with the open source community.

    As your PHB would say, "This is a win-win situation."
  • The S/390 would make a very, very nice server platform for Linux. It's optimized for lots and lots of I/O, all going on at the same time to huge farms of disk and tape and other mass storage. Even a mid-sized 390 can sustain I/O rates that Alphas and SPARCs and PIIIs can only dream of.


    The bad news is that it's strictly a server platform. I don't even know of a natively attached device that can serve as an X display; the 3270 display system is very much screen-oriented and block-structured, designed to have the user fill in a form and hit the ENTER key to have it all processed. They also don't handle async serial I/O worth a damn, necessitating a channel interrupt and transfer for every input keystroke. The upshot of this is that you'll run the system by telnetting into it, and if your IP configuration is hosed, you'll get to use some really horrendous tools to edit the necessary files.
    --

  • Totally cross-platform operating system? (Score:5)

    by The Dodger ( 10689 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @08:17AM (#1496321) Homepage

    If IBM keep this up, they'll be able to offer their customers the same operating environment on any IBM hardware, from PCs to mainframes. This is a smart move on IBM's part, because they are breathing new life into old hardware - customers who might have been considering binning their old IBM mainframes in favour of HP or Sun will now reconsider. They're also going to be giving Internet companies a reason to look at IBM hardware which, after all, has a reputation for being extremely reliable and has a good track record in the financial sector.

    I wonder if they're considering the possibility that they might end up dropping AIX eventually, in favour of Linux.

    The big question, of course, is whether other hardware vendors like HP, Sun, etc. will follow suit. If they do, we could end up seeing hardware companies competing, using Linux as the playing field.

    D.

  • I believe that this could be good for IBM and Linux.

    OS/390 which runs on the S/390 platform currently has a Unix variant running along with "traditional" MVS. A cross compiler which runs Linux programs under this environment would be a tremendous advantage. It would open a lot of programs to the mainframe which would be a real big plus to IBM. As someone who's used Unix System Services, I can say it's not bad but it is definitely suffering from a lack of native applications.

    I doubt IBM would sell a whole lot more S/390 boxes running Linux only. They tried something similar to this by offering a S/390 machine running OS/390 Unix System Services only. They stopped offering it because most traditional mainframe shops are not going to buy a unix mainframe at the expense of their existing programs. Buying another box for Unix is also a rather expensive alternative. Running both would definitely be a plus.
  • If you had read the post last time, it noted that this is merely a rumor. Now we have official word from IBM that they really are porting Linux to the S/390. If you don't like confirmation stories, filter out entire topics that you feel you don't need to hear about anyhow, or better yet, don't read Slashdot.
  • Beautiful hardware (fast I/O, very scalable)

    Annoying Operating System (which PF-key?)

    ..now running Linux. Just think of the ads.. Giant S/390 mainframes standing alone in the middle of an old part of Rome.. no, make that a penguin exhibit at a Zoo.

    Well, at least you can imagine the size of the Tux sticker they could slap on the side of that thing!

    Reality: not much to say except "cool".

    --

  • Actually, they already can.

    OS/390 is UNIX 95 branded, and runs both the Domino webserver & also Apache.

  • IBM supports TCP/IP on OS/390, and I have used a Linux system running X as an X-terminal to the "Unix System Services" facilities of such a machine.

    Yes, IBM's 'native' networking doesn't support the usual cast of Unix remote devices, _but_ the newer IBM networking hardware _does_ support both SNA _and_ TCP/IP, making it easy to attach TCP/IP-enabled devices (terminals, printers, PCs, etc.) to the system. If they've moved any further ahead with Linux on S/390, I don't see any reason why you couldn't access the system from an xterm.
    You certainly can do so now.
  • I have been thinking about the reasons why IBM might be doing this, and came up 2 possibilities:

    1. To compete with Sun's E10K's. Sun has been encroaching on the mainframe realm with these systems. E10K's support up to 64 processors, terabytes of storage and logical partitioning of hardware resources. I don't believe (you can correct me if I am wrong) that IBM has any AIX based systems on par with what Sun offers. It would allow someone a relatively easy upgrade path (at least from a systems/software view) from their AIX systems.

    2. Caving in to all the Linux hype...hey it's good PR.

    On a related note...

    I am not totally familiar with the inner workings of X, but if a S/390 supports TCP/IP wouldn't there be the possibility of using one of these system as an application server server to graphic terminals? Much of the use of character-mode mainframe applications is software related (CICS) and not so much the limitations of the hardware and I/O.
  • Sheesh!

    And you've never been so busy that you've done something twice? Or forgotten you did it the first time? Oh that's right, {smack forhead} your so perfect that you don't want anyone to know who you are because we might fall down in worship. I just plumb forgot.

    I know you where all excited to get first post, but let's get real. These people are human, and by their very nature sometimes make mistakes.

    The sheer ignorance that this type of post displays is amazing.

    Or if you really think you could do a better job than /., goto here [slashdot.org] to grab the scripts that run this sight and start your own competition. After sifting through 300+ submissions a day, you'll be singing a different tune.
  • AIX does not run on S390, it runs on RISC-6000's. There is UNIX System Services on the 390, but it is a part of OS390.

  • Just think if they Beo.... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...oh never mind... Feel free to moderate this down through the floor.. -AC
  • The Linux emulator makes sense. Check out their VM/ESA [ibm.com] web page.

    But on running linux as the base OS...

    I remember interviewing with some OS/390 guys a while back... One of the interviewers worked in the OS messaging/IPC group. If I remember correctly, they had a very large number of people (around 100?) that did nothing but work on messaging and IPC.

    The point is, OS/390 is a very very complex system for very very complex hardware. ja?

    And the rumors expect to have linux ported to bare metal relatively soon? How many people would that have taken? How many years?

    Here's a abbreviated list of S/390 G5/G6 Features:

    Capacity Upgrade on Demand
    Open Systems Adapter 2 (OSA-2)
    OSA Express Express GbE
    Dual cryptographic coprocessors
    FICON channel 100MB/sec full-duplex
    S/390 architecture
    Clustered systems
    Parallel Sysplex clustering technology
    Sysplex Timer®
    Integrated Coupling Migration Facility (ICMF)
    Coupling Facility Control Code
    Coupling links (HiPerLinks)
    Internal Coupling (IC) Channel
    Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex
    Integrated Cluster Bus (ICB)
    Internal Coupling Facility (ICF)
    Shared ICFs and CPs
    Dynamic ICF Expansion
    Transparent ICF Sparing
    Dynamic CF Dispatching
    Enhanced Parallel Sysplex Clock Functions
    VM/ESA Virtual Parallel Sysplex

    To the best of my knowledge, most of this stuff is outside the scope of the linux source tree. We're talking a large amount of work here to make linux take a moderate advantage of the underlying hardware. If they've done it, more power to them. But is just seems to be rumors to me.

    And what about all the OS/390 software, is that being ported to linux also? How long will that take? Or will you only be able to run Domino on it? I guess that my point here is that there seems to be a large amount of good S/390 specific enterprise software out there. To run linux as the base OS would negate the advantages and capabilities of this software.


    "You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
    "It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
  • How is one set of code unable to run on a mainframe, and another able to do it?

    Do they have to include ?

    The OS the S/390 runs was unable to run on an S/390 until someone ported it, and was unable to take advantage of the features until someone coded in support.

    So why can this be done with one OS and not with another? It's not like Linux has a GUI built in at the kernel level or anything.

    And, I'd think conventional Linux and a mainframe OS would be more similar than the Realtime Linux someone made.

    A convergence of OSes is a good thing as should be encouraged. If Linux gets properly ported to the S/390 (as in, works as well as what is there already) then a lot of that code could be folded back into the main branch, perhaps helping stability and scalability to other platforms.

    Just think of the benefits of being able to take code written on a PC and transparently drop it on a mainframe. Your developers could work on PCs, testing code there and then simply by recompiling the code, make it run on a mainframe. What better way to bring legacy systems up to date?
  • Commercially releasing Linux on S/390 "bare metal" would reveal an awful lot of information about IBM's most lucrative proprietary technology, and it is hard to see how that risk would be justified given where Linux stands in the enterprise today.

    Testing a VM version of Linux is a no-brainer, and is hardly anything to get excited about. After all, IBM has had Windows NT running on S/390 VM in its labs for years, but never saw any reason to productize it. Further, IBM long sold a version of AIX for S/390, and it was a non-starter, so why would they now start to offer Linux?

  • Hmm, but isn't the whole point of Linux being Open Source so that they can add drivers for a journalling FS and do something similar to LVM under Linux? In fact, IIRC isn't a journalling FS already in the works for Linux, and should ready in Linux 2.4?

    Maybe IBM & its customers aren't going to ditch AIX/AS400/etc. yet, but who's to say they aren't implementing some advanced journalling FS to be integrated with their Linux port?

    Witness the beauty of Open Source. If it doesn't do what you want, do it yourself. And give back to the community in the meantime. (Except perhaps in this case, where their implementations would probably be proprietary.)

  • When you say (PF) key, you talking about this honking big keyboard from IBM with something like an extra set of keys to the left, two rows of function keys, and a plug similar-but-different from the AT style? I got one of those at a thrift shop and want to hook it up to my PC. Does anyone know how difficult this is, if there are any specs for the keyboard online, etc.? I got two of them, the first was broken so I put some of the cooler key-caps on my PS/2 keyboard, but I got this other one just *begging* to be used...


    mcrandello@my-deja.com
    rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.

  • I don't think that Linux will lack a journalled file system [veritas.com] or logical volume manager [veritas.com] forever.

    D.

  • Certainly it'll be possible to access things via TCP/IP; the problem is that this may not be terribly efficient.

    The mainframe model is that I/O is made really fast by using blocking to a massive degree. Interrupts == evil; blocking == good.

    The UNIX model is more oriented towards streaming; this can be mapped onto blocks, but if the blocks are real tiny, this gets real inefficient.

    This is already somewhat true on a UNIX when running applications across the network; a single keystroke may initiate a couple of packets of network traffic, thereby having a single byte update result in a couple hundred bytes having to cross the net. UNIX suffers somewhat when hit by interrupt-driven programs; MVS suffers a whole lot more.

    The OS/390 hardware has been tuned to do block-oriented I/O, whether we consider disk drives, printers, or terminal controllers.

    This may be a neat hack; I am quite unconvinced that it will lead to a commercially viable product, and in order for it to be of any importance, it has to be commercially viable.

    Countervailing consideration; if some of the following components were provided some "deep hooks" to the kernel, they could both be coded to "bare iron," and thus be fast, and harness the "blockiness" of the hardware, but also allow integration work to take place in the Linux environment:

    • MQSeries is an asynchronous messaging system that is used to build queue-oriented client/server systems; it is "blocky," and thus is a good fit...
    • DB/2 has been tuned to run pretty directly on the bare iron, and does a lot of "mass" reads/writes, again "pretty blocky."

    Linux could provide a way of gluing these things to (say) a web server, and providing an easy front end to customize, whilst letting the respective components take advantage of the hardware's strengths.

    A web server is also likely to represent something that can run pretty effectively on MVS.

  • To the best of my knowledge, most of this stuff is outside the scope of the linux source tree. We're talking a large amount of work here to make linux take a moderate advantage of the underlying hardware. If they've done it, more power to them. But is just seems to be rumors to me.

    OTHO, it would be a huge advantage to IBM to make this move.

    1) Having a single source base for everything (M$ has been hyping this up for Win2000, btw) from mobile to mainframe. This would let them cut down on the # (and/or cost)of developers for packages like Dominio.

    2) Linux OS developers are most likely cheaper than the OS/390 experts. (There are prob. more linux devs. anyway) And a lot of the work is free (GPL'd).

    3) Marketing Marketing Marketing....

    4) If they can get this to market before Win2000 it pulls the feet out from under M$ for the "one source base everywhere".

    5) Marketing (yeah, I know but it's a biggie...)

    6) Makes them look good to the Linux community. (This seems to be becoming an important competition "Who is more Open Source friendly"...

    So not only are they seeing a a cost savings (eventually), it makes them look like "the good guys," something IBM isn't used to.
  • This post does *NOT* substantiate the rumor. And the article is simply a link to the SAME article as two weeks ago.

    C'mon, it's not that hard to look for rehashes. I can't believe that anyone has THAT much of a short attention span!

  • Isn't it great the OSS movement is giving these guys PR ammo? Oh well, at least it seems Linux is benefitting as well; it's all about mindshare.
    In any case, you can be sure there won't be much Linux running on these boxen, even in VM's. AIX/Monterey is what will be running there - it's optimised to do that, and will (does?) run PPC binaries natively (see lxrun).
  • The OS the S/390 runs was unable to run on an S/390 until someone ported it, and was unable to take advantage of the features until someone coded in support.

    OS/390 wasn't ported. It's the latest version of IBM's mainframe OS's, which has roots going back into the 50's. (Earlier computers didn't really have OS's)

  • There was an AIX/370 at one point. AIR it ran under VM. 370 was the architecture that preceeded the 390 architecture. OS390 is

    Thanks for playing.

    Paul
  • IBM's economy is larger than that of just about any of the Third World nations.

    It might not be vastly worthwhile for them to support both, but even should this be a $100M mistake, that's not going to bankrupt them. And I don't think this would be a $100M mistake...

  • There was an AIX/370 at one point. AIR it ran under VM. 370 was the architecture that preceeded the 390 architecture.

    Thanks for playing.

    Paul
  • > The OS the S/390 runs was unable to run on an > S/390 until someone ported it

    I believe that the S/390 runs System/390. ;-)
  • RS/6000s (which run AIX) can have up to 128 nodes of up to 8 SMP processors per node. The 7133 SSA serial disc system can handle up to 3.5 Tb per adapter, at 160 Mb per second throughput. Of course, multiple adapters can be used to scale this, and each of these can have fast caching.

    I think these kick just about everything else out of the water for scalability and ceiling height.

  • Nothing really runs on "bare metal" anymore. Even OS/390 is serviced by the microcode which is a stripped down version of VM.

    As far as revealing the inner workings, if someone really wants to know that they could read the OS/390 Principles of Operations on IBM's bookmanager site. That reveals a lot on how OS/390 interacts with the hardware. From that you could learn a lot.

    But I digress... I also doubt IBM will release a version of Linux without it being dependent upon another OS because of the enormous effort in a direct port. Think of all of the hardware interfaces that would need to be written. The effort would be enormous.

    I bet they: 1.) port the gnu compiler and allow for direct compilation of Linux programs to work within OS/390 Unix Services, and/or 2) Offer Linux under VM as a standalone OS. VM runs other operating systems really well. Both of these would reduce the porting effort because the actual hardware would be hidden. Of course a good port would provide the S/390 platform new applications, something it needs very badly.

  • Re:Intriguing! (Rumours) (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29, 1999 @09:41AM (#1496353)
    I find it intriguing that the rumours always fail to mention the Linux/390 site where the actual work is going on: Bigfoot-- Linux on a Mainframe [linas.org]. Why do the news reporters carry this as a rumour? Doesn't anyone fact check? And why does it say "IBM is doing this" ... only a small fraction of the people involved in this project are employed by IBM, its seems weird that IBM gets all the credit. Whazzup with that?
  • Yes, but what I mean, is that the OS didn't magically appear, ready to run a mainframe. They took the older OSes, took the parts that worked, junked the rest, and rewrote it for the new hardware.

    So yes, it was written for a 390, but I highly doubt they did it from scratch.

    So, at no point did a mainframe-capable OS appear out of thin air, so I see no reason why taking a scalable and robust PC OS, you can't use at least a fair bit of it in a mainframe OS. Sure, the I/O stuff, and other similar low-level bits will have to go, and be replaced with something designed for the hardware, but that happens with the same OS between different hardware anyway.

    And their longstanding OS experience and the fact that they made the hardware, will let them accomplish the transition fairly easily.
  • IBM's never been shy about releasing documentation and architecture reference manuals from the early 360 days through the 390 days.

    On the other front, moving from running under VM to running without VM isn't _that_ difficult since IBM's VM looks a heck of a lot like the real hardware (surprise!) You'd probably need to port the SVC tables or perhaps provide most of the ones that fall under "OS Simulation Services" for VM (the ones like SVC 93/94 that the TPUT macros use.)

    As far as running under VM (which a native version would be able to do as well)- the thing to get excited about is being able to host Linux applications without changing environments, and indeed writing collaberative applications to talk to other VMs. That gives you a signifcant software base for the S/390 that doesn't need to be supported seperately. So, you could run a mail system, USENET, or even hand out shell prompts and not take anything more than some CPU and I/O.

    It also may give IBM some extra hardware for porting projects that can run batch compiles and things pretty quickly. If the port is done well enough, it may give IBM a good internal development platform. Now all they need is a good cross-compiler for i386.

    Paul
  • Beautiful hardware (fast I/O, very scalable)

    Annoying Operating System (which PF-key?)

    That's not the operating system. That's a command and application shell, probably CICS.


    ...phil

  • Yes the S/390 does dupport TCP/IP

    I use it daily for FTP and TELNET 3270 host access.

    Plus I use ADSM for server to host back-up. Nothing like having a couple of terrabytes of DASD to back-up to with the ability to archive to automated tape library.


  • This exact same story [slashdot.org] was posted by Roblimo [andovernews.com] last week on Sat Nov 20. In that very discussion, I posted a comment [slashdot.org] detailing how this was Old News, and that Linux Today ran a related story [linuxtoday.com] the month before that!

    For those who want all the links in one comment: The Linux Today article referenced an article [computerworld.dk] in the Danish version of ComputerWorld [computerworld.dk], and the comments on LinuxToday pointed out this project's home page [linas.org].

    I knew something was funny when the story link for this article was black instead of green like it usually is. Can you moderate an article as redundant?
  • We have nothing to fear from Microsoft's threats about a single, unified Windows source base.

    Everyone knows that the current Windows family is not based on a single source code base. From Windows 3.1, 95, OSR2, 98, NT, Embedded NT ("NT for Toasters"), Embedded CE, 2000, Millenium, Neptune, ... Microsoft has its hands full maintaining app compatibility across multiple code bases. Microsoft has been preaching for years that Windows 2000 will be the convergence of Windows and NT for servers, workstations, and home computers. This is a lie! Microsoft continues to develop Windows 9x (under the codename Millenium) for home users. This product will probably be called something like "Windows 2000" (but without the "Professional" or "Server" suffix, just to confuse things more: same product name, different code base!) Microsoft has forked the Windows 2000 code slightly for Win2K Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter. Microsoft has already forked the Windows 2000 code for Win64 because the Win32 code is not 64-bit friendly. Microsoft has forked the Windows 2000 code yet again for Neptune, the codename for "NT Consumer" product that is to ship after Millenium (Windows 9x cum "Windows 2000 Consumer").

    The Windows source code is a brittle stack of cards. For more Windows 2000 ramblings, see Nicholas Petreley's article Will Windows NT develop into a super-OS or an unmanageable disaster? [ncworldmag.com].

  • Forget about the Mindcraft Benchmarks, take a look at Siemens SAP-R/3 application server. Linux outperforms all other OSs. That included all flavors of Unix.

    For those of you that do not know, SAP is the most powerfull application system, ERP system availible today.

    It runs on virtually any hardware, any OS and any Database.

    Ever wonder what the Fortune 500 or for that matter fortune 5000(midsize) companys run for their end to end applications.SAP is it.

    SAP on Linux will be a big. Right now SAP only supports RedHat6.0 on Intel (IBM, Campaq, HP and Siemens). If Compaq has any sence they will push SAP on Alpha/linux.

    Why not offer better hardware to run your Enterprise than what IBM can buy from Intel? It makes perfect sence.

  • Re:AIX on largescale (yeah, but ...) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah but, like most all the other unix vendors & risc chip makers, you miss the point:
    • The 390 has a killer instruction set for doing I/O more efficiently (with fewer CPU cycles) than any other cpu out there. Sure AIX/irix/slolaris can do XXX TB/second i/o but what good is it if the cpu is 100% busy? The mainframe can do this I/O wich the cpu 99% idle.
    • The 390 allows the disk drive cables to be hundreds of meters long and so you can fill a whole room with disk. You can't do this with an SP/2. You can try using NFS disk servers, or a SAN fabric running SCSI but you'l surrender performance, or number of peripherals.
    • The Linux/390 [linas.org] page says it all: 65536 devices and all of them busy
    • LPAR allows you to boot multiple operating systems. This allows you to create test regions and production regions on the same box, and acheive uptimes that are out of the ballpark.
    • You don't have to reboot the OS to add more disk or even add more CPU's. Does your favorite unix box even allow you to plug in a CPU without turning off power?
    • Address spaces: the instruction set allows 16+ address spaces that all have access to priveldged (kernel) instructions. This allows kernel deamons and kernel modules to each run in thie own address space, without corrupting other parts of the kernel. They could even do an OOPS without taking down the rest of the kernel with them. Its kind of like having "capabilities" [erights.org] designed into the CPU instruction set. There is no other unix/risc-box on the planet that allows you to install a kernel module without compromising the security of the kernel itself. This is exactly how some recent Linux security breaches ahve occured: some cracker got root shell and installed a secret back door as a kernel module.
    • The multiple-address space ability can make client-server and corba really really blaze. No other CPU out there has this ability. All the other CPU's require you to use pipes or sockets or shared mem to do stuff like this. Imagine having a 100% secure syscall without the overhead of pipes/semaphores/mutex's/shmat's!
    I think that everyone forgets that there have been decades of work by really really smart people that have taken this architecture to places that no one else can yet match.

    P.S. lets give credit to the website where this work is happeneing: Linux/390 [linas.org] Its nice that IBM is hyping this, but IBM is *not* pumping actual $$$ into this, the way that e.g. SGI is pumping $$$ into Linux. They're just taking all the credit :-|

  • no. Just the standard function key. (PF stands for programmed function)

    God I wish I knew where this keyboard came from/went to. It has two rows of function keys at the top and then some other crazy keys like the ones on a modern sparq keyboard off ot the left (wish I had one here to get a better description), and IIRC the "F" keys all said "PF" on them. I figured it went to some sort of mainframe. If anyone knows anything about this beast please email me (I'll drop the thread now, promise).

    Just seemed like it'd be really cool to have all my Q3 weapons on the top row and my custom says/taunts on the bottom row...


    mcrandello@my-deja.com
    rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
  • Somehow I don't think that MS has any influence on S/390 development. That computer might as well exist in a different solar system from MS. I can't see how marketing will have much effect, while Linux is everybodys favorite child now OS/390 is very well respected in the S/390 market. S/390s are used heavily in the finantial industry because they DON'T GO DOWN (Billy C. wouldn't like them). While having Linux run in a VM is VERY usefull (running Apache, Samba(!), Domino, firewall, etc with any database or backend software running on the same hardware), running Linux on the bare hardware is just a hobby toy now. That will change as Linux/390 stabilizes and IBM can offer solutions with a consistant environment from desktop PCs to Mainframes. All in all--Neato!

  • Re:Bare metal Linux? I'll believe it when I see it (Score:5)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @10:40AM (#1496369)
    Actually, I've worked a lot on 390 series machines, and in fact this architecture is one of the best documented computer systems ever produced. The IBM 390 Principles of Operation describes every detail about the hardware you would ever want to know. There aren't any "secrets" that I'm aware of.

    Writing software that runs on the bare iron isn't a "mysterious" process ... it's actually pretty easy to do. Of course, in order to actually run your program on the bare iron, you'd need to bring down your mainframe and dedicate it to your program, which is sort of hard to justify ... and heck ... the whole reason VM was invented was because of this problem ... so why fight it?

    We tried AIX/ESA back when it first came out. It was EXTREMELY inefficient, not compatable with anything else in the world, and a general loser. It deserved to die.

    Back in 1993, I sat down with the Linux source and looked into doing a port to our 3090.

    The biggest problems I saw right away were:

    1) Lack of a tree filesystem with long names ... At the time, all VM/CMS had was a flat filesystem with 8.8 character filenames. Ouch!

    2) Lack of a suitable compiler. IBM's C compiler wasn't up to the job. I started to compile using the Waterloo C compiler, which was a better compiler, but I then ran into ...

    3) 8 character symbol name limitations ... in both the IBM and Waterloo C compilers. The workaround for that was to make huge #include files that mapped all of the long function names into unreadable abbreviations.

    4) Not to mention that all my development would have been done in an EBCDIC environment, and the GCC compiler, at the time, had ASCII specific logic, and defied porting. (In EBCDIC, the letters A-Z are *NOT* contiguous, and the numbers 0-9 come after the letters)

    5) The output from the IBM compiler would have been in mainframe TXT format, which is basically 80 column punchcards. I didn't see an easy way to get from that to a unix style (a.out) format.

    6) Device drivers ... The 390 channel subsystem is based on a very high performance model, but it would have required a nearly complete rewrite of the device driver subsystems ...

    7) Paging differences ... the 360/370/390 series has a 1M segment size instead of the more common 16M segment size. This means that a full 2G address space (the 390 series has a 31 bit address space, not a 32 bit address space), would require a 8192 byte segment table for each process. The largest piece of contiguous memory Linux could serve up at the time was 4096 bytes, so I was looking at a rework of the memory management routines ... and a rework of the paging routines for the differently-sized tables ...

    In fact, nearly the entire hardware interface layer was different enough that it would have had to be rewritten. Things like the filesystems looked like they could drop into place without any changes ...

    but after a couple of weeks I came to the conclusion that this was much more then a "quick hack" project, and never pursued it. Always wish I had.

  • In any case, you can be sure there won't be much Linux running on these boxen, even in VM's. AIX/Monterey is what will be running there - it's optimised to do that,

    AIX/Monterey is optimized to run on System/390? Indeed? The Overview page [ibm.com] under the Project Monterey home page [ibm.com] says

    The result will be a single UNIX operating system product line that runs on IA-32, IA-64 and Power microprocessors....

    Nothing in there about System/390.

    So, no, it appears that Monterey will not be running there. Once upon a time, IBM did have a UNIX that ran on System/3xx, and that they called "AIX" (which doesn't necessarily mean it's the same OS as the AIX that runs on RS/6000's), but I'm not sure it's still around.

  • Just as a side note - my employer just purchased a bunch of IBM intellistations, some with linux on them, some NT, some dual boot. The linux system for my desk was good to go right out of the box, I just slapped it on the network, it grabbed an IP via dhcp and I was ready to go. IBM was very willing to work with us to make sure we got a good turn key solution for our linux requirements. This saved my co workers and I a bunch of setup time and really made a difference in getting the systems on the end users desk as fast as possible.

  • SAMBA running on NT? (Score:3)

    by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @10:45AM (#1496373) Homepage
    In the article above, Petreley says this:
    (Ironically, the Samba team claims Samba on Windows NT is even faster than the native Server Message Block (SMB) services in Windows NT.)
    ... has anyone seen Samba running on NT? If so, where can I find some info on it? I checked the Samba pages. Being able to multi-host an NT server would be VERY useful. For instance, to serve file space to multiple NT webservers (including FrontRage extensions, which require WORKING ACLs) without buying a gazillion-user license for NT.
  • 1) I was pointing out to the poster above that AIX cna be run on systems that supass Sun E10000s. I wasn't claiming that RS/6000s have a better architecture than S/390s.

    2) RS/6000s often use SSA adapters as I mentioned, and you can use a fibre optic version of the IBM implementation to put up to 10 km between adapter and host. So you can fill whole rooms with drive boxes.

    3) If you had read the article that was referenced, you would have noticed that it was talking about IBMers working on this, not the guys you mentioned in your link. The rumour that is being discussed in this story is that IBM *ARE* putting dollars into this, and that as they haven't announced this yet, they can't take any credit for it at all.

    well donr on your tehnical knowledge of the S/390, but please read the posts first next time.

  • This may be a neat hack; I am quite unconvinced that it will lead to a commercially viable product, and in order for it to be of any importance, it has to be commercially viable.

    I have the feeling that this is a real case of a self-fulfilling prophecy: it'll be commercially viable because people think it will be. After all, it puts that powerhouse of networking OSes, Linux, on that powerhouse of raw computer strength, S/390.

    Web servers, and DB/2 or Oracle servers, and Samba servers, and other server-side tasks where you're gonna beat hell out of disk drives and not do a lot of interactive computing, are what I was thinking of. Consider an Apache plugin that lets it talk via MQ/Series to, say, a CICS backend app to get its data...especially with IBM's support for Apache. Consider, especially, that this CICS app may well exist already, having been written in 1982 for a vital corporate function and maintained and enhanced since. Written in COBOL, even. Can you say "leverage"?

    The implementation of all this is likely to make Unix weenies turn various shades of green, but IBM is pretty good at hooking things together and making them play. Not quickly, and not well at first, but they do eventually get it right.
    --
  • ObBeowulfComment:

    Think of the Beowulf cluster you could run on that!

    All on one physical machine! ;)

    *duck and cover*

    Jeff
  • As far as revealing the inner workings, if someone really wants to know that they could read the OS/390 Principles of Operations on IBM's bookmanager site.

    Or they could just follow this link [ibm.com] if they don't want to go searching for it.

    The Linux on the IBM ESA/390 Mainframe Architecture [linas.org] page has links to various documents about S/390.

    I bet they: 1.) port the gnu compiler

    It's apparently already been done [cozx.com]. (I think S/370 support has been in there for ages; the link is to somebody offering pre-compiled binaries for OS/390 UNIX services.)

    2) Offer Linux under VM as a standalone OS. VM runs other operating systems really well. Both of these would reduce the porting effort because the actual hardware would be hidden.

    I was under the impression that the "virtual machine" that VM implemented looked rather S/3xx-ish, complete with virtual channels talking to virtual I/O devices that look somewhat like real S/3xx I/O devices.

  • This has been said, but AiX is out of Linux in one very important lead. The future. IBM must spend millions to advance AiX even one minor version number. All they have to do to advance Linux is port it to their own hardware. Then all the hackers out there with spare 390's out there can tweak it and add DVD support.

    Oh wait, that is one flaw with this port. All of the previous ports of Linux have had at least a workstation version of the hardware available to the general community. I don't think there's a Mini-390 out there anyways.

    That means that basically IBM will be the only ones seriously working on it. They had to have figured that out by now.

    Still.. the number of programs that would instantly be able to run on big(REALLY BIG) iron is alluring.
  • This makes sense to me -- that once you've done the VM, the bare metal is kind of a side effect.

    The point I was making was not that the VM didn't make sense -- it obviously does. It doesn't make sense to run Linux on bare metal because you'd lose access to your legacy applications, you'd have to write drivers for every weird peripheral (and GPL them), and you'd have to hope that the particular policies about things like scheduling that Linux implements work in this universe of applications etc.
  • I dunno if there's a full 390 out there in PC form, but there were both XT and AT-bus boards that did a fair job of the 370 architecture - or at least enough to run a version of VM/370, which could fake the rest. I don't know if they were ever used for more than hacking around, but they do exist.

    OTOH, if they don't depend on the latest S/390 architectural features, there are lots of slow, but cheap, machines - 9370-class, for example - that hackers could probably pick up for a song. Until now, they haven't been interesting because there was no freely available/cheap OS for them, but if Linux/390 can run on them, perhaps with some hacking, then they might be worth grabbing.
    --
  • IBM's most lucrative proprietary technology is thoroughly documented and available without even a NDA. This is a result of IBM's own antitrust lawsuit many years ago, where they agreed to document all of their interfaces in order to allow competitors to sell compatible systems. If it wasn't all documented, how do you think Hitachi and Amdahl/Fujitsu could sell machines that run IBM OSes essentially unmodified?
    --
  • My mistake. I've worked on IBM mainframes since '80 and never heard of AIX running on 'em. I guess that shows how popular it was... :-)

    Garg
  • There are several OSs that run on IBM 390 arch. hardware, MVS, VM, and something called Unix... There are many telecom applications that run under UTS on Amdhal hardware (UTS is Amdhal Unix).

    Because one OS relies on blocks of data, does not mean the hardware requires it, it just runs more efficiently that way (less waiting for input). Typical mainframe hardware has controllers for every device attached to the CPU, so the CPU waits for no one! Disk are on controllers, tapes are on controllers, and terminals are on controllers. Did you know that Mainframes were displaying/driving X Windows applications over 15 years ago? Remember, X Windows is data streaming out of a system in packets, and why can't a mainframe generate that data?

    Neat applications are possible when you consider several interesting hardware possibilities: deskside 390 class hardware, old 370 plug-in cards for IBM PCs, and other smaller systems.

    IBM has made some interesting hardware for 390 arch., and running a clean, simple, OS on that rich, rich CISC CPU would be a wonderful thing - as another poster mentioned, IBM 390-class mainframes live for massive I/O.

  • The Linux inside a VM is a go, the bare metal is pretty close to impossible. Both from a technical and social aspects.

    I wouldn't be so sure. As many others have pointed out, the step from running under VM to running on the bare metal is a small one, at least for the basic architecture. Yeah, you don't take advantage of the fancy features, but you don't have to, either.

    I agree that no bank is going to dedicate a whole mainframe system to Linux. I don't see carving out a small LPAR and a few devices to run a Linux server system on a big machine as soemthing they would blanch at, however, and there could well be real advantages there - if nothing else, saving the cost of a VM/ESA license.
    --

  • Are you high? Besides the fact that Linux can easily outperform NT, Linux on the S/390 is a very smart move on IBMs part. Think about all those online stock trading companies.

    Most of the old-school stock trading companies that are now offereing online services have mainframes doing all the backend stuff. Get Apache (running on Linux) to run on the same mainframe and you get a very powerful combination. Add to that all those systems that handle those big customer databases, and you have an all around e-comerce solution.

  • This is interesting, after all Linux on a mainframe grabs my attention, but IBM have already been supplying Unix-type facilities on their machines with OS/390 System Services and OpenEdition OS/390.

    Unix system services provides base UNIX services, a Unix shell interface and support for the dbx debugger.

    OpenEdition was introduced in OS/390/ESA SP V4.3 and originally supported only some of the Posix standards (1003.1, 1003.1a, 1003.1c, 1003.2).
    The latest version (V5.2.2) supports around about 90% of the functions required for XPG4.2 (X/Open Portability Guide).

    OpenEdition includes a C Run-time library, a compiler etc. It includes access to telnet, ftp etc.

    Basically IBM has (finally) realised things like TCP/IP is nicer than SNA (a.k.a Blue Glue) - which I personally can vouch for. They have changed their SNA and APPC protocols to try and emulate peerless comms instead of a hierarchical model.

    Of course they also realised they need for a nice TCP/IP stack etc. Not jumping on the Internet bandwagon would have flushed a lot down the toilet.

    So in fact IBM have themselvs been moving their S/390 environments towards absorbing some aspects of *nix, so I can't really see people putting Linux on the 'bare metal' instead of making use of the inbuilt Unix services.

    Of course you might be trying to avoid hefty licensing fees (and who could blame you!), but I can't really see an advantage to using an S/390 in this way.

    But hey! You can't deny putting Linux on a beasty mainframe wouldn't be cool....be the first on your block to own one!

  • How about logical partitions...

    .guess mode on

    IIRC VM systems can run on logical partitions, each one witha set of different resources. So, you will have a system that is running OS390 and Linux on bare metal at the same time.

    .guess mode off

  • So yes, it was written for a 390, but I highly doubt they did it from scratch.

    Umm...actually, yes. They did write it from scratch.

  • Really? You've seen the source for the 390 OS and all other IBM OSes, and you don't see ANYTHING in common?

    It's a little hard to believe.

    It does come down to a matter of faith, but I find it easier to accept that like the hardware which is in continual evolution, each machine building on the ideas of the previous, that the OS itself is based on previous versions.
  • Has IBM got a six nines GNU/Linux os? Yes please, two for Xmas.
  • First, I am not a mainframer. Never was, never will be. I'm allergic to COBOL. That aside, I've worked with many former mainframers, and heard some of their war stories.

    Apparently, that OS/390 was written (well, rewritten) was a selling point. IBM had problems before with an OS port (not sure when, just heard rumblings) that was either slower on the new hardware, or crashed on the new hardware or something bad.

    So, for OS/390, they decided to rewrite it (re-code, re-optimize, etc.) in toto for the S/390 hardware.

    Meow.
  • Tandem is the market leader in stocks NOT 390.
  • Ah. You'd think that.

    Read the fine print on that OS/390 Unix, and you find that very few applications support it.

    So, while it's there, AOYC Inc.'s business applications won't run on it, so you end up buying AIX which AOYC have ported to and either running a dual shop (RS-6k + S/390) or you ditch the S/390 which is a big revenue loss for IBM.

    That companies like AOYC (and SAP and JDE and Oracle etc.) have mentioned Linux means a massive cost savings to shops, and a massive preserved revenue stream for big blue.

    Meow.

  • So maybe you're right... I'm no expert and I don't know who is the market leader but, you're missing the point.


    What I'm saying is that Linux on the S/390 (and other mainframes) is a good idea... for online stock trading and e-comerce solutions and all kinds of other stuff. If IBM does it (and it actually works), then others will do it too.


  • Point seen...and you're right. It lets IBM customers leverage existing hardware under long-term contracts and existing staff to do new "internet" stuff without screwing over the existing business applications.

    And as someone else said, with SAP (et al) announcing Linux versions, it makes a very nice way to transition from a proprietary mainframe application to a new proprietary but externally supported SAP application.

    Meow
  • Yes, I am replying to my own post, to add something to it.

    I originally intended for comment #53 to be funny and informative. Funny, because here we have a whole article that fits a -1 moderation category, and informative, for the links.

    I suppose it is somewhat redundent, but as I pointed out, the whole article is. I think moderating me down to zero was a little uncalled for, but who am I to argue with Slashdot?

    In any event, in no way did I intend to insult or attack the the two Robs and the rest of the Slashdot masters. I realize they are human and make mistakes. I think laughing at the mistakes (not the people, mind you) is a great way to releave stress, and that was part of the intent of my post. If I offended anyone (and I suspect I did, given the -2 moderation I got), I apologize.

    Cheers,
  • If you read that article youll find its all speculations. No hard facts.
    Now I dont happen to know for shure that theyre not developing it, but I was over there at the development section for the S/390 applying for a job less than six months ago. And believe me, they told me a lot about what they were doing.
    The were looking for people with Linux and Java experience, but not for the S/390 itself. They have a Thinkpad thats sort of built into the main machine and being used as a controller (to boot up the mainframe and to monitor it etc.).
    Theyre are moving that thing from OS/2 to Linux and Java, which is no big deal since its just another PC. Thats not to be confused with the real machine, which is an altogether different issue.
    Id say it is highly doubtful. To make Linux work on their mainframe would require a complete rewrite, they might as well develop a new OS from scratch.
    Besides the performance gain for this machine lies in its tailored applications. OK so it takes longer to do that. But why would anyone want to run a slow emulation on his expensive hardware? Besides, companies take much longer to upgrade even windows boxes, they dont install the latest hype everyday like you freaks. They take 2 to 3 years. Why should they care if porting SAP to the S/390 takes a little longer?
    Use your brain people, think (different).

  • If IBM were serious about Linux on the S/390, I wouldn't be surprised if they made a machine or two available to bona fide Linux hackers who wanted to work on the OS.

    D.

  • sorry to interrupt, but isn't HP's v-2500 a MUCH more substantial computing platform than either of the above mentioned, io not withstanding?

    Perhaps, but this misses the point: S/390s are, above all, superb engines for I/O processing. Most commercial data processing - including the kinds of things that businesses would love to put on the web - is far more dependent on I/O speed than CPU power; very little actual computation goes on.
    --
  • This has nothing to do with whatever IBM is doing, but with what Linas Vepstas and friends [http] have done:

    The following trace is from my IPLing Linux on Princeton's VM box yesterday. I don't have a root file system set up yet, so it bombs kind of early. But you can see what the first part of the boot sequence looks like: (I've added <br> tags to preserve the formatting)

    ipl 191
    Linux version 2.2.1 (root@cheapo.rvdheij.iae.nl) (gcc version egcs-2.91.66 19990 314 (egcs-1.1.2 release)) #58 Tue Nov 23 15:31:32 CET 1999
    SAPL booting from VMLINUX MODULE dated 991129 152545
    Command line: root=/dev/mem
    ramdisk_cmsfile=0191:root.disk
    register eckd0 at major=60 i_dev=0
    Device 9 is console (5, 1)
    register eckd1 at major=60 i_dev=0
    register eckd2 at major=60 i_dev=0
    register eckd3 at major=60 i_dev=0
    register eckd4 at major=60 i_dev=0
    register eckd5 at major=60 i_dev=0
    vm_load_ramdisk()
    Failed to load ROOT DISK (rc=1)
    exit vm_load_ramdisk()
    trap init with storage key=0
    enter time init
    exit time init
    vid3270_putcs 1 chars at (0,0):

    vid3270_putcs 1 chars at (0,0):

    vid3270_putcs 79 chars at (0,1):
    Console: mono vid3270 80x24
    Calibrating delay loop... 1710.49 BogoMIPS
    trap init with storage key=6
    Memory: 9264k available (524k code, 356k data, 32k init)
    Init Ramdisk: 0k [00000000,00000000]
    kmem_create: Illgl flg 500 - signal_queue
    POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
    i370_kernel_thread
    i370_sys_clone flags=0xf00
    i370_copy_thread, usp=0xa1fe8
    i370_copy_thread: finished swapper pid=1 regs=000fc764
    i370_sys_clone(): after do_fork, res=1
    i370_kernel_thread(): return from clone, pid=1
    task switch swapper/0 -> swapper/1 PSW 0x3680000 0x80014716 cpu 0
    current sp=0xa2420 next sp=0xfc828
    i370_sys_clone(): after do_fork, res=0
    i370_kernel_thread(): return from clone, pid=0
    Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
    Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
    i370_kernel_thread
    i370_sys_clone flags=0xf00
    i370_copy_thread, usp=0xfc5e0
    i370_copy_thread: finished swapper pid=2 regs=000f888c
    i370_sys_clone(): after do_fork, res=2
    i370_kernel_thread(): return from clone, pid=2
    Starting kswapd v 1.5
    i370_kernel_thread
    i370_sys_clone flags=0xf00
    i370_copy_thread, usp=0xfc5e0
    i370_copy_thread: finished swapper pid=3 regs=009de88c
    i370_sys_clone(): after do_fork, res=3
    i370_kernel_thread(): return from clone, pid=3
    vid3270_putcs 1 chars at (0,0):

    vid3270_putcs 79 chars at (0,1):
    Console: switching to mono vid3270 80x24
    Keyboard hardware init
    pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
    RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
    VFS: Cannot open root device 00:00
    Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00
    HCPGIR450W CP entered; disabled wait PSW 000A0000 8000DEAD

    The next question is, why would you ever want to run Linux on the bare metal?

    You wouldn't.

    At least, not if you had a real S/390.

    But for those of us who don't, or who find it inconvenient to get to one, there's Hercules [freeserve.co.uk].

    So if Linux/390 runs, even poorly, under Hercules (i.e., on the bare iron), I don't have to either work under x3270 on an actual mainframe, nor do I have to build a cross-compiling GCC to do development and porting on the Linux/390 platform.

    Of course it'd be nice if IBM would start distributing evaluation, software-only versions of VM so I could load VM on Hercules and then Linux under VM. But now I'm just fantasizing.

    Adam

  • SNA (Score:2)

    by slim ( 1652 )
    While I've had some headaches fighting with SNA, and I'll be the first to admit I don't know everything about it, I'm led to believe that SNA offers a lot of QOS features missing from IP.


    --

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