By Zack Brown
Developer Services Editor, Linuxcare, Inc.
According to Alan Cox’s 2.2.14pre14 patch, Linux now has at
least preliminary support for running on the IBM S/390 Mainframe.
Rumors that IBM has been engaged in a port have been circulating
for some time, but this is the first concrete code that has
surfaced to date. Back in October of
this year, a Danish Computerworld article broke the story that work
was in progress. IBM confirmed the story, and then on Dec 4, a cryptic
statement
from IBM announced that the S/390 could act as a server for
Linux clients. It said nothing about an actual port, however.
Yesterday, Alan Cox announced his latest pre-patch, including
“Most of the IBM S/390 port merge,” though apparently not
everything IBM submitted to him. In a later post to the
linux-kernel mailing list he added, “It seems to be a full SMP port
with disk, networking and consoles.” In the same post, he pointed
out that the port only applied to the 2.2.x series, and that IBM
had not yet submitted any patches for 2.3.x.
In the patch, the principle architects of the port appear to
include:
- Denis Joseph Barrow
(djbarrow@de.ibm.com,barrow_dj@yahoo.com) - Dieter Wellerdiek (wel@de.ibm.com)
- Hartmut Penner (hp@de.ibm.com)
- Holger Smolinski (Holger.Smolinski@de.ibm.com)
- Ingo Adlung (adlung@de.ibm.com)
- Martin Peschke (peschke@fh-brandenburg.de)
- Martin Schwidefsky (schwidefsky@de.ibm.com)
- Stefan Hegewald (hegewald@de.ibm.com)
An email sent to each of these developers requesting more
information, got only the following reply from one of them: “I’m
very sorry, I am not authorized to give you any information now. We
have noticed your interest, and probably come back to you
soon.”
So IBM may not be talking yet, but I’m sure we can expect to
hear a lot more about this from them, once they clear their
collective throat.