Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 11:18:31 -0500 (EST) From: Matthew Emmerton <matt@gsicomp.on.ca> To: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Ken Bolingbroke <hacker@bolingbroke.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-platforms@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD on S/390? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0103011115140.22128-100000@xena.gsicomp.on.ca> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1010301085555.65459D-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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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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