Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

IBM To Transition Their z/OS, POWER + AIX Compilers To Being LLVM/Clang-Based

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #21
    Originally posted by uid313 View Post

    To have all their developers focus on one platform instead of having them develop multiple platforms and systems at the same time. It is redundant and a waste of resources. Imagine if IBM put all those developers focusing on Linux.
    It would still be on different features most people don't use as they are not running a 4k core machine with 8 TB of RAM or something in their closet, so it would not change much.

    Comment


    • #22
      Originally posted by uid313 View Post

      I was not aware of this. What use cases are these?
      Global realtime mission-critical apps, such as validating VISA transactions or airline reservations. Nothing moves data around like the Z boxen can.

      Comment


      • #23
        Originally posted by Space Heater View Post
        IBM's z-series mainframes do not use the POWER ISA, and the microarchitecture is different between z and POWER as well (beyond just the decoder).


        My bad. I was under the impression that ALS4 is where they started using a common processing core.

        Comment


        • #24
          Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
          Could you make some examples? I'm curious, I don't know much of z/OS.
          Some financial institutions run on z/OS (so if you don't need money this may not matter to you), and some airline scheduling/planning systems run on z/OS (so if you never leave your basement this may not matter to you), and numerous manufacturing and inventory systems run on z/OS (so if you don't need toilet paper this may not matter to you). Those are all things many people consider somewhat mundane, but they are also the underlying infrastructure that we all depend on. All of those systems could in theory be migrated to something else if there was a reason and there were platforms with the same reliability, availability and serviceability as the Z hardware and software, but spending billions (trillions?) of dollars to get equivalent functionality tends not be something most execs see as a good use of their money.

          Comment


          • #25
            Originally posted by CommunityMember View Post
            Some financial institutions run on z/OS (so if you don't need money this may not matter to you), and some airline scheduling/planning systems run on z/OS (so if you never leave your basement this may not matter to you), and numerous manufacturing and inventory systems run on z/OS (so if you don't need toilet paper this may not matter to you).
            None of what you said answers the question "what are cases where z/OS is superior to Linux"

            That's at best a vendor lock-in thing where they started using something and it was good enough and now they keep using it because migration costs would be insane.

            I mean, there are still poor souls locked to HP-UX and Slowlaris the Unbenchmarkable, this does NOT make them a good OS.

            platforms with the same reliability, availability and serviceability as the Z hardware and software,
            Is this quantified or measured somehow and somewhere?

            Because I know of RHEL servers that have been up for nearly a decade with no incidents, and were shut down only recently, when decommissioned and removed from the racks.

            Hell, I know of servers rocking Windows 2003 (Windows XP equivalent for servers) that are still up now and operational, never shut down, never crashed. They won't be shut down any time soon as they are part of some industrial automation control infrastructure.
            Last edited by starshipeleven; 05 March 2020, 12:35 PM.

            Comment


            • #26
              Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
              Could you make some examples? I'm curious, I don't know much of z/OS.
              Some other examples were given like large scale transaction processing, flight reservation systems. Application types with extremely high uptimes, consistent processing models (like fairness) and secure storage and memory space addressing. The applications have to be able to leverage the capabilities that Z/OS provides on top of the hardware that supports it.

              Many of these use cases have been duplicated in large scale distributed clouds where redundancy through high layering of inexpensive hardware and the use of Linux is prevalent.

              It's not like people go out and shop a Z against distributed clouds all the time, because both are expensive, both require certain skillsets and they have to able to support it operationally.

              Air traffic control is another good use case. The NGTC (Next Generation Traffic Control System) is supposed to replace an ancient S/360 that is overloaded, and last I read the Z system that was recommended was because it has a better ability to process more datapoints needed for proper airspace management and coordinate those datapoints visually to a ATC representative.

              Recently I have seen more and more use of Z/Linux because they want the flexibility and compatibility of Linux based applications, but want the controls of Z/OS. These cases have focused on applications that have a large degree of MQ/DB2 integrations.

              Comment


              • #27
                Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
                None of what you said answers the question "what are cases where z/OS is superior to Linux"
                You must be unaware of just how much z/OS offers out of the box vis-à-vis major Linux distros with thousands of supported packages. Just the size of the z/OS documentation is intimidating. For a flavor, look at just one manual and uncover the capabilities of the WLM (workload manager): https://www-01.ibm.com/servers/resourcelink/svc00100.nsf/pages/zOSV2R3sc278419/$file/izua300_v2r3.pdf and compare to any distro's capabilities in this area.

                Comment


                • #28
                  Originally posted by dlcusa View Post

                  You must be unaware of just how much z/OS offers out of the box vis-à-vis major Linux distros with thousands of supported packages. Just the size of the z/OS documentation is intimidating. For a flavor, look at just one manual and uncover the capabilities of the WLM (workload manager): https://www-01.ibm.com/servers/resourcelink/svc00100.nsf/pages/zOSV2R3sc278419/$file/izua300_v2r3.pdf and compare to any distro's capabilities in this area.
                  Eh. SUSE and RHEL have tons of documentation too, and quite frankly after a quick glance the WLM seems like a GUI frontend for something that systemd does already in Linux, OK it is polished and it has a nice GUI but I don't really feel like I need a GUI for that. If it is a "cluster management console" then there is stuff like Cockpit or others.

                  Really, you need to understand my point here. It's far from my expertise, and understanding it by reading documentation is impractical (it would need a lot of time and I would need something to experiment/work on), that's why I'm asking for opinions from people that knows them more directly.

                  I was expecting more down-to-earth answers like "on Z/OS you can do this cool thing, on Linux you cannot".

                  Comment


                  • #29
                    Your expectations are not my responsibility and I expect nothing from you. WLM is like cgroups on steroids and has been around longer than cgroups, let alone systemd. It is not just a GUI.

                    Comment


                    • #30
                      Originally posted by dlcusa View Post
                      Your expectations are not my responsibility
                      Who are you answering to? I guess you like to waste your time because if you answer me and post things I didn't ask for it's a waste of time.
                      WLM is like cgroups on steroids
                      ENHANCE. What can it actually do more than what systemd/cgroups do. Some real-life examples or go home.

                      Really, I'm sick of people that try to look important by pumping up the thing they are working on, that's why I'm low-tolerance.

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X