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Date:      Thu, 1 Mar 2001 09:01:09 -0500 (EST)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG>
To:        Ken Bolingbroke <hacker@bolingbroke.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-platforms@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD on S/390?
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1010301085555.65459D-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0102281826140.75034-100000@fremont.bolingbroke.com>

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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.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project
robert@fledge.watson.org      NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services


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