[Gllug] Lindows

[David Damerell]

On Wednesday, 21 Nov 2001, Ian Northeast wrote:
>Interestingly the latest range of servers Sun are producing appear to
>have the same facility and are being marketed as "mainframes". Plus ca
>change and all that.

Only they don't, unless things have changed dramatically. An S/390 can
have an arbitary number of guest OSes on (Telia have something like
4,000 GNU/Linux installations on one), and increasingly can readily
migrate machine resources between them - not just under operator
control, but automagically as they are needed. Furthermore, I believe
that basically any component of an S/390 can be swapped out without
shutting it down.

Sun's Enterprise 10,000 has up to 16 processor boards (each containing
up to 4 processors and 4Gb of memory); each guest OS ("domain", in
Sun-speak) can use one or more of these boards, so there's an absolute
maximum of 16 domains with resources allocated in a very granular
way. If you have fewer domains than processor boards, you can migrate
boards between domains under operator control, but this is awkward and
doesn't always work. Furthermore, peripherals - discs, Ethernet
adaptors, whatever - are attached to processor boards, which further
limits your ability to do this. Although the machine can survive the
failure of most hardware components, it will normally be impossible to
replace them without a shutdown; only a processor board that is not
the first in a domain and does not have any vital peripherals on could
potentially be replaced. (It's possible to replace any processor board
if you're willing to shut down the relevant domain.)

Later machines in the series are larger, but - I believe - have
fundamentally the same limitations. The other difficulty from our POV
is that, although somone has booted Linux on an E10K, Sun don't really
want to help.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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