Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 19:52:21 -0600 (CST) From: Jay Nelson <noslenj@swbell.net> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: IBM (Was: Re: funny repair remark) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.10001201908490.520-100000@acp.swbell.net> In-Reply-To: <200001202107.OAA16183@usr01.primenet.com>
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On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Terry Lambert wrote: >> >IBM has also supported the idea of "FreeBSD certification" of >> >IBM systems; Doug Ambrisko spent some time validating a >> >machine, only to have the Advocacy group _not_ show up with a >> >FreeBSD certification logo. >> >> Interesting. I always wondered what FreeBSD would be like on an SP. > >Any real advocate, I think, has wondered the same thing. FreeBSD seems more suited to the environment than AIX. Curiously, the SP wouldn't work without the tools that come out of the box with FreeBSD. Ah, well -- the infinite mystery of IBM. >> Are they willing to open up information for MCA, SSA and other useful >> devices? > >The MCA stuff is well documented. I have a 386 PS/2 box that That's curious. With all the 3xx and 5xx machnes still running AIX 3.2.5, I'm surprised the NetBSD folks haven't ported. >Along with a lot of other stuff. You have me at a disadvantage >with "SAA"; I assume you mean AS/400. No -- I mean SSA -- the serial disk architecture. IBM is claiming 160MB across the buss and from what little I've seen, seems like it will do a reasonable percentage of that in real production. With a rack full of 7133s (64 18Gb drives) I think there would be a number of places interested. The controllers will do Raid 0-5 reasonably efficiently and there are two loops on the controller for mirroring. It's nice gear. All of the critical, high availability configurations I do are based on SSA disk architecture. I'd be interested in your opinion when you see it. >The AS/400 is unsuited to running C. It uses a 64 bit pointer, >8 bits of which are a check-value. This means that running C >code that does pointer arithmatic or array indexing would be >nearly impossible with a free compiler. I was under the impression that the xlc compilers were ANSI compliant. Given what you are telling me, how in hell are they going to "enable" Linux on that platform? [snip] >I remember a FreeBSD certification discussion, as well as a >"FreeBSD Certified Engineer" discussion (an attempt to get in >on the RedHat certification frenzy), but nothing really came >from that, as all of the hacker types shouted down all of the >business types that wanted it. Out here in the ditches, the certification cuts a lot of weight with the management droids. They generally have no basis on which to judge new hires because they know nothing about Unix or operating systems in general. I've seen good, experienced mainframe people fall back on the "certification" because they didn't know Unix and didn't know how to judge an applicant. The hacker types would probably have more opportunity to work with more interesting and less limited systems if there was such a thing as a "FreeBSD Certified Engineer". >> Do you know what IBM is doing with the *BSDs? > >The WebConnections product is based on a customer premesis >equipment provided by IBM, and services. The equipment being >provided is a Whistle InterJet. InterJets run FreeBSD. > >IBM has also been publically recognized to be bidding FreeBSD >into school districts in Taiwan. That, I didn't know. Is that information available on any accessable site? >NTT is bidding InterJet hardware into school prefectures for >approximately 28,000 schools in Japan. Where are the announcements? I haven't seen any of this on ILINK. (They must be hiring too many teenagers -- most of the "official" IBM info has been slow or non-existent lately.) >There are a number of FreeBSD projects scattered around IBM, >now that the due dilligence has been passsed on Whistle. Some >projects are using Linux, but only because they haven't heard >of FreeBSD, or because they are on non-Intel chips, and the >alternatives are Linux or NetBSD. Do you know of anything going on in Austin that you can tell me about? >At least one project at Almaden has switched to FreeBSD. Ahh... _That's_ interesting. Can you reveal which one? >At least one person responsible for the IRDa standard, and an >IBM employee, is working on drivers for some IBM hardware. Terry, you're getting short on information;) Is this... >And then there's a lot of stuff that I can't tell you about, >but which I personally find exciting. ... Yep -- the good ole IBM line;) Thanks for the insight. -- Jay To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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