[Qemu-devel] Hipervisor

[Qemu-devel] Hipervisor

[Khan, Mohammad]

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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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Re: [Qemu-devel] Hipervisor

[Mark Williamson]

> 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.

As well as z/VM for their really big iron, IBM recently introduced a 
hypervisor for their POWER-based machines.  See: 
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/ondemand/ve/

I've not used it myself - the hardware's rather out of my price range ;-)

Cheers,
Mark


> >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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> This message is intended only for the use of the Addressee and
> may contain information that is PRIVILEGED and CONFIDENTIAL.
>
> If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified
> that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited.
>
> If you have received this communication in error, please erase
> all copies of the message and its attachments and notify us
> immediately.
>
> Thank you.
> ********************************************

Re: [Qemu-devel] Hipervisor

[Paul Brook]

> >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.

The POWER5 chips also contain hardware partitioning features to allow running 
a hypervisor. I'm not sure if these have actually been released yet though.

Paul

Re: [Qemu-devel] Hipervisor

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 09:31 -0600, Khan, Mohammad wrote:

> >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. 

Hrm... You seem to forget iSeries, which had an hypervisor for some
times now on POWER and even runs ... OS/400 :-) pSeries too has an HV
though until recently, it wouldn't do virtual IOs or virtual CPUs, but
the newly introduced pHyp that comes with POWER5 does have all these
features. In fact, newer iSeries use that too.

Ben.