[TUHS] UNIX on S/370

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/20/17, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Maybe this is my lack of knowledge of VM showing, but how did having VM
> > help
> > you over running on the bare hardware?
>
> It would mean that you wouldn't have to implement machine check
> support and other hardware error handling.  The VM hypervisor would do
> that for you.  It would also let you run multiple versions of UNIX
> simultaneously.  Very convenient if you're doing kernel or driver
> development.

The "simpler hardware handling" is a big inducement to building
on top of VM. Or at least starting out that way.

Even though AIX/370 was aimed at the educational market, my impression
is that it was still pretty expensive.  When I worked at the Emory U
computing center (mid 80s) I heard about it, but management wasn't
interested in trying to get it for their S/390.

I'm pretty sure I remember hearing at some point, I don't remember when,
that AIX/370 could run either under VM or on bare iron.

Any idea what Linux/370 does?  I think it runs on bare iron.

Arnold