From owner-freebsd-platforms Thu Mar 1 8:20:22 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-platforms@freebsd.org Received: from xena.gsicomp.on.ca (cr677933-a.ktchnr1.on.wave.home.com [24.43.230.149]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1B4C337B71A; Thu, 1 Mar 2001 08:20:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from matt@xena.gsicomp.on.ca) Received: from localhost (matt@localhost) by xena.gsicomp.on.ca (8.11.1/8.9.3) with ESMTP id f21GIVl22243; Thu, 1 Mar 2001 11:18:31 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from matt@xena.gsicomp.on.ca) Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 11:18:31 -0500 (EST) From: Matthew Emmerton To: Robert Watson Cc: Ken Bolingbroke , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-platforms@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD on S/390? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-platforms@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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