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Why not just run it on the Hercules emulator? https://sdl-hercules-390.github.io/html/
Even regardless of difficulty, building and running on real hardware is desirable to make sure that you've actually got a correct build going. Emulators can have bugs, including bugs that might give you a false positive about working builds when it really isn't.
I'm curious who would use Postgres on S390x, and, I guess, who uses Linux on S390x in general?
I'd be interested in reading the perspective of someone actually deploying it though.
Why not just run it on the Hercules emulator? https://sdl-hercules-390.github.io/html/
Besides, it’s much faster to build on real metal than on Hercules or QEMU.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fastest z series CPUs are just modern 7nm, 8core superscalars with built in AI coprocessors, a fancy large cache arch, virtualization, and a _base_ clock of 5ghz. I imagine they aren't the wizbang magic intel has, but I doubt they are slow. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Telum_(microprocessor) https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/ibms-telum-mainframe...
It's the size of the caches, memory bandwidth, and high core count, of some of these mainframes that make them interesting to me. It could be fun to play around. I'm sure they eat electricity like crazy though.
Not really. They are in line with similarly capable rack-sized servers and clusters. A fully configured z16 is four racks full of gear.
Where can I get info, how to make required changes to get software compiling and running on s390x? For example, some software requires CPU-specific assembler code. I can not get some code to compile correctly: https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/s390x
I'd be interested to see performance relative to Intel machines.
The fastest z series CPUs are just modern 7nm, 8core superscalars with built in AI coprocessors, a fancy large cache arch, virtualization, and a _base_ clock of 5ghz. I imagine they aren't the wizbang magic intel has, but I doubt they are slow. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Telum_(microprocessor) https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/ibms-telum-mainframe...
Also, if they were competitive wrt performance, people would be using them. In real life they are rarely found outside of financial institutions.
I'm curious who would use Postgres on S390x, and, I guess, who uses Linux on S390x in general?
The big claim to fame for the IBM Z series is supporting hot failover so the workload will never go offline. For web tier or app tier, where you want to scale horizontally anyway, it's pointless overkill, but for relational databases that have a maximum of one write master, you could make the argument that it's valuable. I'd be interested in reading the perspective of someone actually deploying it though.
Neat project, but there are easier, more cost-efficient, and well-documented methods available now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open Source maintainers can ask for a) ssh access to s390x VM b) web console access where it's possible to create and remove VMs, for example 2 VMs, 8 GB RAM per VM With some distro like RHEL, SUSE, Ubuntu. One mainframe runs very many VMs. All access is monitored.
Is this the LinuxONE Community Cloud, or a different resource?
I'd be interested to see performance relative to Intel machines.
The fastest z series CPUs are just modern 7nm, 8core superscalars with built in AI coprocessors, a fancy large cache arch, virtualization, and a _base_ clock of 5ghz. I imagine they aren't the wizbang magic intel has, but I doubt they are slow. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Telum_(microprocessor) https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/ibms-telum-mainframe...
"The z10 processor was co-developed with and shares many design traits with the POWER6 processor, such as fabrication technology, logic design, execution unit, floating-point units, bus technology (GX bus) and pipeline design style, i.e., a high frequency, low latency, deep (14 stages in the z10), in-order pipeline.
However, the processors are quite dissimilar in other respects, such as cache hierarchy and coherency, SMP topology and protocol, and chip organization. The different ISAs result in very different cores – there are 894 unique z10 instructions, 75% of which are implemented entirely in hardware. The z/Architecture is a CISC architecture, backwards compatible to the IBM System/360 architecture from the 1960s. [1]
[0] https://speleotrove.com/decimal/IBM-z6-mainframe-microproces...