IBM linux/390 source code availability

By Marvin Lukasik

Dec 28, 1999

Hey Roger, now that IBM has made their port of
Linux to s/390 freely available, would examining
that help you? It may reveal some of the
undocumented/poorly documented features of IBM's
latest iron. Just wondering....
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2:42 am

Re: IBM linux/390 source code availability

By Roger Bowler

Dec 28, 1999

Marvin Lukasik wrote:
>Hey Roger, now that IBM has made their port of
>Linux to s/390 freely available, would examining
>that help you? It may reveal some of the
>undocumented/poorly documented features of IBM's
>latest iron. Just wondering....

I pulled down the file linux-2.2.13-s390.diff.tar.gz from
http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/linux390/download_src.
html
The most interesting thing I found in there is some code which uses
the service call instruction to communicate with the HMC (or hwc as
they call it). Unfortunately the authors of this work, although IBMers,
seem to have adopted the Linux style of coding (i.e. no comments at
all) rather than the IBM style, so you would need to be very keen to
decipher this stuff, and I'm not sure that hercules really has a need
for HMC support.

I must admit it's not immediately obvious to me what benefit there is
in running linux on S/390. An interesting technical exercise, but I don't
think it's going to supplant MVS just yet.

Roger Bowler

3:07 pm