[plug] AS/400 and Linux

[Hennie Strydom]

On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 08:47 +0800, Peter Tran wrote:
> Bret Busby wrote:

> A friend and I were donated two rather large AS/400's (and boy are those
> things are heavy! 300kg of computing gear sure is hard to move on a 38
> degree day!), we figured that if we could run an instance of Linux on one of
> the partitions, we might be able to roll in a few more instances (on
> different partitions) and have all our Linux machines running concurrently
> at a co-located site.
> 
> Having that been said, it's really just a learning experience.

>From a learning experience point of view I would also like to be
involved, but what you describe here sounds like the much older CISC
processor AS/400's.  From what I can recall (and note that I was never
an expert on these systems, and have not worked on them for many years)
this hardware had limitations that would make running Linux on it quite
difficult.  It came as a bundle of hardware and OS/400, and the raw
hardware had only a single address space and no concept of user and
kernel mode.  Also the CISC processor was about as capable as a P1.

I might be wrong in my diagnosis and interpretation of the facts, and
stand open to correction, but if you have a large black AS400 the width
and depth of a rack about 1.6M high you likely have the CISC model.  On
the other hand, if it is only about 90cm high it could be a RISC model,
which should run Linux nicely.  (I never tried to lift either beast
[value my back intact] so I could be very wrong about the weight.)  This
obviously is the worst way to determine OS/400 model specifics, and I
had experience in a limited variety of models, so I could be wrong even
if it is a huge box.

If it looks viable, count me in.

Regards
  Hennie