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IBM authorizes OpenSolaris on mainframes

Anonymous Coward

Free Solaris -Come & Get Your Free Solaris 

Stop

...just need a $5 million mainframe and a room full of silver haired guys to run the mother ship...

Anonymous Coward

Might have to try this on hercules 

As someone interested in the Z platform I've been playing around with zLinux on Hercules which, believe it or not, is a mainframe emulator for your x86 box. It runs like an arthritic tortoise, but seems to work.

I might have to have a go with Sirius now.

When do we get a "Big Blue" icon to go with the good/bad jobs and gates?

Damn Yank

Hercules! Hercules! 

Thumb Up

(what movie??)

We have Hercules (and, ahem, z/OS) running on a Macbook - and it actually performs quite well!

It is good for porting and lightweight testing.

I wouldn't want to fire up CICS & DB2 or anything like that.

zLinux is slow on real 'z' hardware - there is so much emulation and other voodoo going on under the covers that it is and always will be a slug...

Mark Cathcart

@damn yank 

You must have some other problem with your zLinux performance, there is NO emulation going on on real z hardware... suggest you go over to IBMVM listserv and see whats going on http://listserv.uark.edu/archives/ibmvm.html

Anonymous Coward

Re: @dam yank 

Unhappy

Regardless of emulation, z hardware is slow anyway. That's why IBM doesn't put out any benchmarks for z. sssssllllllooooowwwwww.....

Big, tattooed Fred

@damn yank, @Mark 

Even better, go to the Linux for z series list:

http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?linux-390

The Velocity guys can probably help.

Anonymous Coward

@Re: @dam yank (sic) 

Slow? Depends on what you measure. Yes, the processors themselves have not historically been quick but the I/O subsystem is shit hot and will beat the hell out of pretty much anything else in terms of throughput. Horses, courses.

Anonymous Coward

Re:@Re: @dam yank (sic) 

Happy

"Depends on what you measure."

How about actual performance. Overall performance. You need a balance and the Mainframe gives you reliability, stability, and predictability but it sure as heck runs slow... But at least you know it'll finish doing what it's doing... someday.