On 7/18/06, Jim Elliott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There will be NO further 31-bit (32-bit) distros (the s390 versions) for the mainframe. IBM announced months ago that from now on only "patches" for the s390x (64-bit) would be made
I believe you were corrected on this already before? The patches from IBM are already for quite some time against a single source tree that produces both the s390 and s390x kernels depending on your config options. When the folks in Boeblingen don't try compilation for s390 and don't test it on 32-bit anymore, we can expect some more problems in that area. I have seen such things already with dependencies on new hardware that can not be fully configured out. As long as you have modern hardware, running the 64-bit distribution will only cost you some extra memory, CPU cycles and disk space. That does make it a bit harder to get a business case for a solution that exploits Linux virtualization on z/VM. And it allows for bigger mistakes to be made. With z/VM 5.2 several of the restrictions for Linux in 64-bit mode have been removed. The way SuSE were shipping their 32-bit packages for the 64-bit distribution was a royal PITA but they may be able to fix that when they only have 64-bit for SLES10. IMHO this is similar to the decision not to test non-SMP kernels (although I am convinced the majority of Linux servers on the mainframe will have only one virtual CPU). Since some time you cannot compile SMP=n anymore without patching things yourself, and it's not obvious to me that kernel would take fully advantage of the fact. No surprise the distributors only provide SMP kernels. Rob ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390