7 ms·

Porting Go to Linux on IBM Z Architecture

66 points by diakritikal 11y ago

bradhe 11y ago
> IBM Linux on Z Open Source Ecosystem Center of Competency Man, what a name for a group!
- ams6110 11y ago
  LOL. My observation as well. Truly a name that IBM would invent.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  They're in a pissing match with DOD on this kind of thing, apparently...
- jgalt212 11y ago
  I enjoy SAP Center of Excellence > Going live with SAP enterprise applications is only the end of the beginning. In order to thrive after go-live, you need the right organization to drive continuous business improvement. http://michaeldoane.com/SAP_Center_of_Excellence.html http://michaeldoane.com/SAP_Center_of_Excellence.html
ju-st 11y ago
IBM is really trying to make the mainframe "cool"
- f2f 11y ago
  since when is the mainframe not cool?
  - ju-st 11y ago
    hip or trendy would have been better words (instead of cool) in my original post I think
    - iheartmemcache 11y ago
      Won't happen and thank god too. The hip and trendy crowd have no idea how to do long term support. JavaEE is the farthest from "hip and trendy" but you can fire up a 15 year old WebSphere application on brand new hardware and it'll work better than the day it was written, with full first-party support for every component that was supported from day one. I've seen production code REXX and JCL code from the 1970s which ran System/360 hardware with actual decades of uptime since the IBM mainframe was 100% redundant (literally every component from the DASD to the RAM and CPUs, which all supported hot-swappability for upgrades and failover, all within a 42U). It boggles my mind at how robustly these systems were designed. I.e., the original 360 code was based on a weird-ass 31-bit architecture. Now z/10's can run in 64 bit mode, 32 bit, 31 bit[1], or 16 bits with full support for every single application written from (theoretically 1964, but I've only seen code from the 70s still running) all the way up to Clojure and Scala if you want it. Take a look at all those hip Ruby frameworks and look at when Yehuda Katz last made a commit to Merb and you'll figure out why CIOs still buy SAP and pay for Oracle. IBM is lucky not to deal with the 'hip and trendy' demographic- it'd just further damage their already faltering image in the corporate world. The real market share they should be trying to pickup is not the frivolous Web 3.0ish junk. They instead should be pushing out a POWER8 + DB2 + fault-tolerant (i.e., milliseconds failover, not seconds) for under 250k with an ERP attached to it (partner with SAP Business One, 98% of the businesses doing under 250MM in gross per annum don't need more htan that). AIX 7 already has "Cluster-aware" software that does this, they just need to include it by default for up to 4U. THEN, start price gouging. Market it under the name "NEVER/down", partner with PureStorage or one of the new "EMC-killers", and aggressively market it like they did during the Watson hype (tennis ad-buys, advertising at LeMons, etc). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ESA/390 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ESA/390
      - delish 11y ago
        I often see odes to ibm mainframe reliability. I'm piqued. Is playing with POWER or mainframe stuff edifying for a regular person, and if so, can a regular person obtain them?
        11y ago
- vegabook 11y ago
  this z-enterprise box is infinitely more cool than any tin-cased rack mount. http://www.v3.co.uk/IMG/475/231475/ibm-zec12.JPG http://www.v3.co.uk/IMG/475/231475/ibm-zec12.JPG Golang on this sucker. Can you imagine...
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Pascal once ran on IBM nainframes for an easy to learn, read, and compile solution. Go is latest in Wirth philosophy of languages. Good it's going on mainframe, too. Even better is that it's often used for I/O intensive (eg networking) applications. Mainframes' Channel I/O blows traditional server architecture away in throughput. Should give a boost.
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  Go is a Wirth language? Do you have a source for that?
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I said "Wirth philosophy." It's his style of a language in action but invented by others. Greisemer had enjoyed the simplicity and productivity of Wirth's Oberon language at a point in the past. He wanted to re-create and expand on that in their C++ replacement. Source is below: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/live/gophercon2015/123645585015 https://sourcegraph.com/blog/live/gophercon2015/123645585015
    - Cyph0n 11y ago
      Yes, I got that. Thanks for the link!
aus_ 11y ago
IBM has been recently promoting Docker on z. IBM argues the high I/O capabilities of their platform are a good fit for the container model. (I don't disagree with them. The many-application-on-big-hardware model is not a new concept to IBM. Hell, they invented it.) Anyways... Since Docker is written in Go, the only way Docker has been available for s390x was by building with gccgo. My guess is that native Go support is in the interest of Docker on z and would be a worthwhile investment for IBM.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  IBM is also the second-biggest contributor to Cloud Foundry after Pivotal (for whom, disclaimer, I work). Almost all new CF code is written in Go. I expect they're going to position mainframes as an ideal platform for CF installations (under a title like "BlueMix Z").
- cbd1984 11y ago
  > Docker on z. Docker on Linux on VM on LPARs on z. Nobody say it...
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    More likely Docker on Linux on LPAR. At that point you'd struggle to see the value of VM, other than making some of the device management/maintenance easier.
copy 11y ago
They also created a native OCaml backend for IBM Z very recently: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/275 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/275
donatj 11y ago
What is Z exactly if I may naively ask? I've heard it's name but I'm not familiar.
- skissane 11y ago
  CPU architecture of contemporary IBM mainframes. The 64-bit successor to the 24-bit/31-bit IBM System 360/370/390.

66 points by diakritikal 11y ago

bradhe 11y ago

> IBM Linux on Z Open Source Ecosystem Center of Competency Man, what a name for a group!

ams6110 11y ago
LOL. My observation as well. Truly a name that IBM would invent.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
They're in a pissing match with DOD on this kind of thing, apparently...
jgalt212 11y ago
I enjoy SAP Center of Excellence > Going live with SAP enterprise applications is only the end of the beginning. In order to thrive after go-live, you need the right organization to drive continuous business improvement. http://michaeldoane.com/SAP_Center_of_Excellence.html http://michaeldoane.com/SAP_Center_of_Excellence.html

ju-st 11y ago

IBM is really trying to make the mainframe "cool"

f2f 11y ago
since when is the mainframe not cool?
- ju-st 11y ago
  hip or trendy would have been better words (instead of cool) in my original post I think
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    Won't happen and thank god too. The hip and trendy crowd have no idea how to do long term support. JavaEE is the farthest from "hip and trendy" but you can fire up a 15 year old WebSphere application on brand new hardware and it'll work better than the day it was written, with full first-party support for every component that was supported from day one. I've seen production code REXX and JCL code from the 1970s which ran System/360 hardware with actual decades of uptime since the IBM mainframe was 100% redundant (literally every component from the DASD to the RAM and CPUs, which all supported hot-swappability for upgrades and failover, all within a 42U). It boggles my mind at how robustly these systems were designed. I.e., the original 360 code was based on a weird-ass 31-bit architecture. Now z/10's can run in 64 bit mode, 32 bit, 31 bit[1], or 16 bits with full support for every single application written from (theoretically 1964, but I've only seen code from the 70s still running) all the way up to Clojure and Scala if you want it. Take a look at all those hip Ruby frameworks and look at when Yehuda Katz last made a commit to Merb and you'll figure out why CIOs still buy SAP and pay for Oracle. IBM is lucky not to deal with the 'hip and trendy' demographic- it'd just further damage their already faltering image in the corporate world. The real market share they should be trying to pickup is not the frivolous Web 3.0ish junk. They instead should be pushing out a POWER8 + DB2 + fault-tolerant (i.e., milliseconds failover, not seconds) for under 250k with an ERP attached to it (partner with SAP Business One, 98% of the businesses doing under 250MM in gross per annum don't need more htan that). AIX 7 already has "Cluster-aware" software that does this, they just need to include it by default for up to 4U. THEN, start price gouging. Market it under the name "NEVER/down", partner with PureStorage or one of the new "EMC-killers", and aggressively market it like they did during the Watson hype (tennis ad-buys, advertising at LeMons, etc). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ESA/390 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ESA/390
    - delish 11y ago
      I often see odes to ibm mainframe reliability. I'm piqued. Is playing with POWER or mainframe stuff edifying for a regular person, and if so, can a regular person obtain them?
      - 11y ago
vegabook 11y ago
this z-enterprise box is infinitely more cool than any tin-cased rack mount. http://www.v3.co.uk/IMG/475/231475/ibm-zec12.JPG http://www.v3.co.uk/IMG/475/231475/ibm-zec12.JPG Golang on this sucker. Can you imagine...

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Pascal once ran on IBM nainframes for an easy to learn, read, and compile solution. Go is latest in Wirth philosophy of languages. Good it's going on mainframe, too. Even better is that it's often used for I/O intensive (eg networking) applications. Mainframes' Channel I/O blows traditional server architecture away in throughput. Should give a boost.

Cyph0n 11y ago
Go is a Wirth language? Do you have a source for that?
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I said "Wirth philosophy." It's his style of a language in action but invented by others. Greisemer had enjoyed the simplicity and productivity of Wirth's Oberon language at a point in the past. He wanted to re-create and expand on that in their C++ replacement. Source is below: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/live/gophercon2015/123645585015 https://sourcegraph.com/blog/live/gophercon2015/123645585015
  - Cyph0n 11y ago
    Yes, I got that. Thanks for the link!

aus_ 11y ago

IBM has been recently promoting Docker on z. IBM argues the high I/O capabilities of their platform are a good fit for the container model. (I don't disagree with them. The many-application-on-big-hardware model is not a new concept to IBM. Hell, they invented it.) Anyways... Since Docker is written in Go, the only way Docker has been available for s390x was by building with gccgo. My guess is that native Go support is in the interest of Docker on z and would be a worthwhile investment for IBM.

jacques_chester 11y ago
IBM is also the second-biggest contributor to Cloud Foundry after Pivotal (for whom, disclaimer, I work). Almost all new CF code is written in Go. I expect they're going to position mainframes as an ideal platform for CF installations (under a title like "BlueMix Z").
cbd1984 11y ago
> Docker on z. Docker on Linux on VM on LPARs on z. Nobody say it...
- rodgerd 11y ago
  More likely Docker on Linux on LPAR. At that point you'd struggle to see the value of VM, other than making some of the device management/maintenance easier.

copy 11y ago

They also created a native OCaml backend for IBM Z very recently: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/275 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/275

donatj 11y ago

What is Z exactly if I may naively ask? I've heard it's name but I'm not familiar.

skissane 11y ago
CPU architecture of contemporary IBM mainframes. The 64-bit successor to the 24-bit/31-bit IBM System 360/370/390.