[rescue] Re: AS/400 question

[Scott Newell]

>>    Is IBM's AS/400 Linux obtainable (i.e. downloadable)?  Is it worth
>> hunting down one of these machines?
>
>I would *guess* that it is.  I know *I* can get it, but that's different.
>I would probably suggest running OS/400 anyway.  There's all sorts of
>other machines that will run Linux better.

Even if you wanted to run Linux, you'd still have to have OS/400 installed
to host it, correct?  (That's my conclusion after a quick scan of the
"Linux on iSeries" whitepaper, anyway.)

As far as porting something like *BSD to run native on the iron, aren't you
still gonna get stuck when it comes supporting the rest of the hardware
(storage, networking, etc.)?  While IBM may publish the CPU instruction set
details, I'll bet that they won't let go of the system architecture goodies.


It appears to be 404 at the moment, but I think
http://users.snip.net/~gbooker/as400.htm contains the text of a couple of
emails from some IBM engineers explaining why Linux will never run on the
CISC hardware: to begin with, they don't support virtual memory, paging, or
protection in a compatible way.  Too slow to be useful, as well.

newell