It’s all the rage on YouTube, apparently…  posting video of a z/VM system booting something.  Only kidding, this is a good piece of tech.  If you search YouTube for “OpenSolaris System z” you’ll find a set of five videos that show an interview (recorded at the recent Gartner datacentre conference) with David Boyes of Sine Nomine Associates demonstrating OpenSolaris running on an IBM System z mainframe.  It’s a great achievement, and a fine piece of work — but there’s a catch.

I can’t stress enough what a great job David, Neale (Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!), Adam and everyone at SNA have done.  Networking is not there yet, but I trust it’s not far (need a hand fellas? (: ).  It must have been a hard slog, and for some (particularly Neale) perhaps brought some unpleasant memories (anyone remember Bigfoot?).  Congratulations are deserved.  I can see the lolcat now: I IS SUN. IM IN UR MANEFRAYM, KIKIN OUT YR PENGUINZ.  YA RLY!  Only joking!

The catch is, ironically, the aspect of the port that makes it most useful in the “real” world.  The guys have made the port dependent on z/VM.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s the right thing to do — without z/VM, you can’t play to the strengths of the System z platform and it’s capabilities for massive resource sharing in a virtualisation environment.  Many believe that Linux on System z should have been taken in the same direction, as other platforms (like System p) do big-single-Linux-footprint better than what System z does.

The twist is that by tying the OpenSolaris port to z/VM, they’ve eliminated a set of would-be hackers from contributing to the effort.  Those with motivation, time, skill, and a big Intel box who can get a couple of hundred MIPS out of Hercules.

There are, rightly or wrongly, a lot of people who think that Solaris is a good platform.  These are the kind of people I’m thinking of — maybe folks who have always derided the mainframe, but perhaps are now thinking “gee, well if it runs Solaris now, it can’t be all bad.  Maybe I’ll check it out”.

Obviously I can’t speak for Sun (nor for IBM or SNA), but I’m sure I read that one of the objectives of OpenSolaris was to get Solaris into more hands and to try and benefit from the “millions of set of eyes” effect that Linux enjoys.  It seems ironic then that the first “non-Sun” platform to which OpenSolaris has been ported is one that doesn’t contribute to that goal.

Not to worry.  David at SNA has stated that they are committed to releasing their work to the community.  This will be the point at which an interested party could look at the code and potentially rip out or rewrite the z/VM-specific bits and replace them.  It wouldn’t be impossible — even CMS was able to IPL standalone once upon a time — but it would be a huge piece of work (no doubt part of SNA’s reasoning was to let z/VM do a lot of heavy lifting for I/O and such tasks; that would have to be written for OpenSolaris).  Bags I not-it.  Likewise, our potential interested party would be very likely to turn away to Linux… or even away from System z entirely.

Meh, enough doom-talk.  I’ve downloaded three different flavours of OpenSolaris for x86 (NexentaOS which I had a brief look at previously, Solaris Express Developer Edition, and something that called itself the “Indiana Preview”) and I’m running them in VMware to have a poke around (but not all at the same time, they need a heap of memory).

I’ll be following this as close as I can (or as close as I’m allowed).  I think it will be really interesting to see how this progresses.  Good luck to all involved (and if you need a hand guys…

Tags: opensolaris, z/VM