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Mono on AIX and IBM i

mono-project.com

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Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#41

Post by slededit »

dragontamer wrote: post #18
Narishma wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main problem is that there are no low-cost POWER systems for people to tinker with like there are for x86 and ARM. You are limited to expensive high-end servers, and that leads to a lack of software support.

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/TWR-P1... Power certainly exists, its just less popular. The above board is under $250 and seems to be good enough for tinkering usage. Software support is certainly weaker. I think Power9 primarily exists for people who are planning to write their own application servers, or otherwise are willing to spend time recompiling OSS over to the Power9 architecture (Gent…

QorIQ is moving to ARM though, so don't expect that segment to continue. Also there's a pretty big difference between embedded PPC that has lost to ARM and POWER9.

Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#42

Post by hapless »

freehunter wrote: post #38
falcon620 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cause every Unix-like OS is exactly the same? At the end of the 90s they had spent like 15+ years diverging from each other. Some more gracefully than others.

But it's not Unix-like. It's Unix. It's actually Unix, as in UNIX™. But at any rate, your comment implied it should be dead because it's so old. Which is a silly statement, considering just how old UNIX™/Unix systems actually are.

I think the implication was that he thought it sucked 20 years ago, so it is surprising that it has continued to suck for 20 more years

Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#43

Post by hapless »

sigzero wrote: post #40
falcon620 wrote: post #13

Huh. I honestly thought AIX was dead by now. I remember porting something to AIX 20 years ago, it wasn't fun. I guess IBM stuff doesn't die, it just gets more expensive.

The whole hosting environment for the project I am on went from Solaris to AIX.

a frying pan to fire situation, huh?

Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#44

Post by dragontamer »

justincormack wrote: post #37
dragontamer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/TWR-P1... Power certainly exists, its just less popular. The above board is under $250 and seems to be good enough for tinkering usage. Software support is certainly weaker. I think Power9 primarily exists for people who are planning to write their own application servers, or otherwise are willing to spend time recompiling OSS over to the Power9 architecture (Gent…

That board is a 32 bit power board, not really much use for ppc64 development.

And the Rasp. Pi 3 uses a small 4-core in-order ARM-A53 instead of the out-of-order bigger core ARM-A57 that's behind the ThunderX2.

Point being: if you want to really develop for big things (like ThunderX2 or Power9), you buy the big thing. I'm not entirely sure if the "small embedded" stuff, like Rasp. Pi, really help.

Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#45

Post by southern_cross »

lambda wrote: post #27
calvin_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a friend who's employer was throwing out an E4A. OS/400 is also pretty interesting from an architecture perspective too.

Yeah, it might be kind of interesting to play around with IBM i/OS/400. Oh, and I guess I shouldn't have called it a mainframe operating system; that's z/OS. IBM i is their minicomputer operating system.

Hardware-wise, IBM i can scale up from basically a thick pizza box to something relatively monstrous in size. The architecture and OS are still relatively advanced, too, even by today's standards. Those of us who know its history sometimes think of it as "IBM: The Next Generation", since it was based at least in part on the Future Systems project, a replacement computer architecture that never quite came to complete fruition. IBM has never marketed it as a mainframe-class system, though.

Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#46

Post by southern_cross »

lambda wrote: post #3

Seems like IBM is really increasing its investment in open source software and hardware for PowerPC recently. I've noticed them offering bounties for PowerPC related work on Rust, there's this recent work on Mono, and OpenPOWER has led to the development of truly open servers and workstations like the Talos II.

IBM has been doing more lately with open source, but not really to a level that matches the endeavors of others. OpenPOWER may be gathering some real momentum, though, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if we start hearing more about it in the future.

As for Mono itself, this particular implementation isn't an IBM project, and when I personally discussed the matter with them some ten or so years ago they said they had discussed it internally but had no particular desire to pursue it at the time. They gave me some good reasons for this but I don't remember the details.

Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#47

Post by [deleted] »

lambda wrote: post #16
steveklabnik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you have a link to those bounties? I haven’t seen them but would be very interested!

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/46345753-altivec-vsx-sup... I looked into doing this briefly, and a couple blockers were that I couldn't find any easy cloud services offering POWER that I could use for testing, the cheapest dev system I could find, the Talos II Development System, is itself $5000 once you add RAM and storage ( https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2DS1/intro.html , they do have a cheaper system avai…

[deleted]

Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#48

Post by voxadam »

lambda wrote: post #26
dragontamer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/TWR-P1... Power certainly exists, its just less popular. The above board is under $250 and seems to be good enough for tinkering usage. Software support is certainly weaker. I think Power9 primarily exists for people who are planning to write their own application servers, or otherwise are willing to spend time recompiling OSS over to the Power9 architecture (Gent…

Raptor does have a sub-$2000 machine on pre-order: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL1BC1/intro.html That is starting to approach the price point where it's worth it if you want to tinker, but with something that is a lot closer to a real machine than a $250 embedded board. I tried taking a look for cloud services that offer POWER machines, but couldn't find anything that I could just sign up for and try for relativ…

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab offers development hosting on their POWER8 OpenStack cluster.[1]

[1] http://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/

Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#49

Post by calvin_ »

falcon620 wrote: post #13

Huh. I honestly thought AIX was dead by now. I remember porting something to AIX 20 years ago, it wasn't fun. I guess IBM stuff doesn't die, it just gets more expensive.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's more i shops using newer software than AIX shops, nowadays. IBM's own ports of things like nginx, node, and Ruby to "AIX" were all to support i.

Re: Mono on AIX and IBM i

#50

Post by pjmlp »

southern_cross wrote: post #45
lambda wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it might be kind of interesting to play around with IBM i/OS/400. Oh, and I guess I shouldn't have called it a mainframe operating system; that's z/OS. IBM i is their minicomputer operating system.

Hardware-wise, IBM i can scale up from basically a thick pizza box to something relatively monstrous in size. The architecture and OS are still relatively advanced, too, even by today's standards. Those of us who know its history sometimes think of it as "IBM: The Next Generation", since it was based at least in part on the Future Systems project, a replacement computer architecture that never quite came to complete…

I used an AS/400 as operator back in 1994, was mostly taking care of doing backups.

Sadly I never got to program into them, but at least .NET (on Windows), Android seem to share some of the ideas.

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