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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-platforms" in the body of the message
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