Linux creator Linus Torvalds has released version 2.6.26 of the Linux kernel after a lengthy three-month development stretch since the 2.6.25 release involving nine release candidates. In announcing the release on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds said the 87 days since 2.6.25 makes 2.6.26 a longer-than-usual release cycle. Torvalds said the changes from release candidate (RC) 9 are small, with the bulk (80 percent) being documentation updates.
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Member since:2006-01-19
What I don't get is what it is actually for. I mean, if you paid for the mainframe for the usual reasons, it seems natural you wouldn't mind paying for VM, which has been doing the job for 30 years. Heck, if IBM thought it would matter, sales wise, they could give VM away.
Not that I care that they did it, I just wonder who is going to use it. But then I feel that people read too much into the whole 390 Linux thing: IBM had no viable UNIX for the mainframe, some customers have the mainframe as their strategic platform and wanted to consolidate a little UNIX here and there, and Linux was convenient. Some see it a crown jewel in OSS acceptance (because mainframe is teh awesome!), but I don't really get how enabling one of the world's most closed computing systems is consistent with OSS goals. But then again, I don't buy mainframes 
Member since:2005-07-06
One possible reason: consistency. When you have x86 in more numbers, the management frameworks using it such as libvirt or virt-manager can be reused for other architectures if the underlying technology is same or similar. While libvirt can abstract away these details, it is useful when it is ported and available everywhere.
Member since:2005-07-06
S/390 can support nested virtualisation in hardware, I think. You might well be running z/VM on the bare hardware and Linux in guests (I understand this is normal). But this should make it easy to run guest operating systems inside those guests. Since I think the hardware is designed with this in mind, it might not be as prohibitive, performance-wise, as you might think.
One advantage of this would be that you can carve up the machine coarsely using z/VM and give the resulting VMs to various business groups or individuals and then say "If you need more partitioning, use KVM and do it yourself".
I don't know if anybody ever runs Linux on the bare metal hardware. I guess it's not inconceivable that IBM are looking at deprecating z/VM in favour of leveraging Linux+KVM but I'm not sure getting rid of z/VM would be The IBM Way. Just having KVM available for nested virtualisation seems like a useful result in itself, so I assume that's what they're thinking of.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Huh? Do you realize that IBM has contributed the patches? Read the actual commit messages? IBM has been contributing in the past to Xen too. When virtualization becomes more of a commodity, they still get to make money from services from a expanded market.