[rescue] Re: AS/400 question

[vance at neurotica.com]

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Scott Newell wrote:

> >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.)

I don't know anything about Linux on AS/400.

> 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.

I don't know enough about these machines to formulate an opinion.

> 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.

But the OS/400 implied license I'm talking about is only on RISC machines
anyway.

Peace...  Sridhar