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Yes, certifying DB2 for Linux (back in 1998, https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=db2+linux https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=db2+linux, scroll to bott
by jamiesonbecker 3y ago
Yes, certifying DB2 for Linux (back in 1998, https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=db2+linux https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=db2+linux, scroll to bottom) was an absolutely earth-shattering event that announced that Linux had arrived. I think that event (and of course Oracle and Sybase a few months prior) really sounded the death knell for big-iron UNIX.
But in 1999, IBM ported Linux to run on System 390 (https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=mainframe+linux https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=mainframe+linux) and I remember there was a story that some IBM scientist booted more than 30,000 Linux instances on a mainframe on his lunch break. This research led to the big SUSE partnership, as well as open-sourcing other enterprise-y software like JFS and putting a big devteam to make the kernel ready for real SMP (Linux didn't have efficient+mature SMP even into the early aughts, although a few companies had built some massive SMP boxes.)
- ghaff 3y ago>Linux didn't have efficient+mature SMP even into the early aughts, although a few companies had built some massive SMP boxes Including IBM. (Forget when they did their big stackable X-series server.) A lot of the tech eventually became applicable to even super-mainstream dual-socket servers but I wonder how much money was largely wasted on building and trying to sell larger scale-up boxes. But, yeah, IBM was one of the big investors in OSDL (and their own Linux Technology Center) which had a lot of scale-up focus which made a lot of the legal claims of another 3-letter company pretty much misaligned with the timeline.