Re: architectural goals, Byte Addressability And Beyond

In article <gf6l5jtdreabgsud0qss6fu0cs17udisdb@4ax.com>,
quadibloc@servername.invalid (John Savard) wrote:

If they took it to its logical conclusion, and packaged
zArchitecture chips without the ability to run current
IBM operating systems in the same way as POWER chips,
I might actually be interested.

A deskside zSeries machine that would boot and run Linux (probably under
z/VM) reasonably simply would be interesting to me. A big-endian machine
with comprehensive hardware trapping has software QA uses in the current
era of machines that hardly trap on anything apart from SEGV.

I looked into Hercules, but the community for that is mostly interested
in running historical 31-bit MVS and other elderly OSes. Hercules needs
quite a lot of configuration set up, which requires using a lot of IBM
mainframe terminology and concepts, and doesn't supply a configuration
file for Linux. Setting it up is hard if you've never been a mainframe
operator, and the community isn't all that helpful to outsiders.

John