[CentOS-devel] CentOS for IBM Mainframes.

Tue Feb 20 18:01:35 UTC 2018
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On 20 February 2018 at 11:42, Javier Romero <xavinux at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2018-02-20 13:21 GMT-03:00 Fabian Arrotin <arrfab at centos.org>:
>> On 20/02/18 17:14, Javier Romero wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I see that IBM LinuxONE, provides a Z Mainframe running with Linux Red
>>> Hat, SUSE OR Ubuntu Server distros.
>>>
>>> Do you think that could also be useful for CentOS to be another option
>>> for LinuxONE?
>>>
>>> Maybe a a CentOS Mainframe SIG can be created to work on this.
>>>
>>> Thanks for your attention.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Javier Romero
>>
>> Hi Javier,
>>
>> That would probably be for the AltArch-SIG , already building CentOS 7 for
>>  - IBM Power 8 (ppc64, ppc64le)
>>  - aarch64 (aka ARMv8 , 64bits)
>>  - armhfp (aka ARMv7 , 32bits)
>>  - i686
>>
>> But the s390 question was raised already in the past, but finding :
>> - people willing to bootstrap the rebuild
>
> Well, I'm very interested on contributing with this.
>
>> - on dedicated hardware donated to the project (yeah, difficult part)
>> is a "challenge" :)
>
> Is there any chance that IBM donate this hardware for the CentOS
> project? Think that will be also useful for that company to have
> another Linux distro running on their Z Systems.
>

I can only say from the Fedora side, that it is very complicated. IBM
does not donate mainframes in the same way they may donate PPC
hardware to a site. Where-ever the hardware is requires dedicated
resources (water cooling, extra power conditioning) and contracts with
IBM. The contracts seemed to be the longest time and I don't know what
it entailed as it is lawyer stuff. There was just a long time of "we
can't" then "oh we can but you will need to use this one system we
have in a far away location using these methods".



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.