Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 01:01:09 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: noslenj@swbell.net (Jay Nelson) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: IBM (Was: Re: funny repair remark) Message-ID: <200001220101.SAA24201@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.10001201908490.520-100000@acp.swbell.net> from "Jay Nelson" at Jan 20, 2000 07:52:21 PM
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> >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. I'll go look. If it's not available for PC class hardware, I will probably never see it, unless the mail me somewhere. > >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? I expect they're compiling with xlc, not gcc. The point is, you can never have a fully self-hosted free system, without a free tool chain. Right now, both FreeBSD (especially) and Linux have hosted cross-compilation issues, having to do with using tools generated for the target in building the target (instead of using cross-tools targeted at the target but built for the host for building the target). This was a matter of much discussion a while back. [ ... ] > 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". I have to say that if you are in the Bay Area and know FreeBSD, then you have a job. We're hiring, if anyone is interested (hint, hint). > >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? It was press released. I can dig for it, but it's in the -advocacy archives, somewhere. > >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.) This is a pre-IBM Whistle deal, which IBM is keeping alive (they have good sense... 8-)). Whistle announced it with NTT last June or so; I don't have a copy of the release at hand, but I'm sure they announced it being printed in CRSN or something like that. > >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? No. We haven't really hooked into the IBM grapevine nearly anywhere as far as we wanted to have done by this time. 8-). > >At least one project at Almaden has switched to FreeBSD. > > Ahh... _That's_ interesting. Can you reveal which one? A secret one. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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