[Qemu-devel] Hipervisor

[Khan, Mohammad]

Karl wrote thus

 

>I just did a quick search, and didn't find anything useful about

>AS/400.  IBM has something called OS/400 (now called i5/OS), but that

>looks like something in the OS/370, OS/390 family.  I don't think

>AS/400 is in the OS/370 family, but I could be wrong.  AS/400 may have

>been phased out.

AS/400 is not dead, it’s alive and well under its new name iSeries. OS/400 is the operating system for it ( though it has a new name as well) and is VERY different from OS/360,370 etc. BTW latest incarnation of OS/360 is called z/OS and is binary compatible to OS/360 applications written some 40 years ago.

>It would be really cool if eventually QEMU could emulate IBM POWER

>based servers well enough to run IBM's hypervisor.  The hypervisor

>virtualizes the hardware for the operating system(s) proper and

>provides resource partitioning.

I guess you are talking about IBM’s VM but it only runs on zSeries(latest incarnation of S/360) hardware and not on POWER. BTW there are already emulators for IBM’s zSeries including an open source emulator called Hercules. Hercules runs on Linux as well as Windows and Mac. 

>Imagine VMware slimmed down and ported to run on the bare hardware so it doesn't need a host operating

>system and you've got a hypervisor.  Generally, the hypervisor

>logically partitions resources and runs a seperate operating system

>inside each partition.

Can’t this be done using customized bare bones Linux so that all it runs is QEMU and its supporting utilities, possibly in text mode? May be the current active guest (the one that the user is interacting with) can be given almost full control of devices like video, removable media, sound card etc. BTW I’m out of my depth here so I might be very wrong. Any comments, anyone?

>Anyway, being able to play around with (emulated) high-end hardware that was

>designed for hypervisors would be cool.

> 

Unfortunately no, the problem there is that IBM won’t allow you to run their software on Hercules unless you pay real big $$$$$$, not even for non-commercial purposes. For this reason the Hercules community is forced to either run z/Linux (Linux/390) or use the last free version of MVS dated around 1978. And yes, IBM operating systems used to be free ( and open source ! ), you just had to buy the hardware.

Mohammad

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