5 ms·
PostgreSQL on S390x
- maximilianburke 3y agoI'm curious who would use Postgres on S390x, and, I guess, who uses Linux on S390x in general?
- heelix 3y agoHonestly, it just works. I can do a docker image that runs on aarch64, amd64, and s390x. For the SpringBoot apps - the hardware is rock solid and far more important, cheaper and under provisioned than the other 'standard' compute for those who have piles of legacy systems. OpenShift on zSeries is not a lot different than Intel based boxes.
- maximilianburke 3y agoYeah, that all makes sense. Is it just big financial instututions that doing this? I can't go to IBM Cloud and kick off some S390x VMs, can I?
- mnd999 3y agoIf you have an enterprise deal I think you can.
- opencl 3y agoYou can indeed get S390X VMs from IBM cloud, either running z/OS or Linux: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/vpc?topic=vpc-vs-profiles&interface=ui https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/vpc?topic=vpc-vs-profiles&interfa...
- xet7 3y agoOpen 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.
- johnmertic 3y agoIs this the LinuxONE Community Cloud, or a different resource?
- xet7 3y agoYes, this is LinuxONE Community Cloud.
- tristan957 3y agoI wonder if IBM Cloud runs it on s390x.
- vaxman 3y agoWhen you type Softlayer.com into a web browser what happens and why?
- tristan957 3y agoI don't know the why.
- archgoon 3y ago[dead]
- solatic 3y agoThe 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.
- ttfkam 3y agoBidirectional replication (aka multi-master) was added to Postgres in v16. Most others like MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, et al have supported it for quite a while now. Neat project, but there are easier, more cost-efficient, and well-documented methods available now.
- chasil 3y agoWhy not just run it on the Hercules emulator? https://sdl-hercules-390.github.io/html/ https://sdl-hercules-390.github.io/html/
- csdreamer7 3y agoIt is under the Q Public License. Had to look it up because it has been a while Qt used it.
- chungy 3y agoThat's probably a heck of a lot more difficult than just running a s390x container via QEMU user mode emulation. 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.
- rbanffy 3y agoEmulation is never perfect and, if you are running your database on a “seven nines” platform, you really want it thoroughly tested on the real thing. Besides, it’s much faster to build on real metal than on Hercules or QEMU.
- xet7 3y agoWhere 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 https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/s390x
- daaahhdekfbb 3y agoYou want the principles of operations manual (that's the ISA reference) if it's seriously troublesome stuff, but usually there is no need for anything like that. Oftentimes issues are things like the system being Big Endian. If it were z/OS and not Linux you'd need to deal with a different object format and some weird calling convention stuff (even if sticking with z/OS Unix, it's not a SysV calling convention, and it's not ELF, but it is POSIX and SuS), and also EBCDIC interop possibly, so slightly more difficult, but still doesn't usually require doing any assembly. A lot of common nix software will compile and run just fine with no changes.
- unixhero 3y agoCompiler flags?
- andrewstuart 3y agoI'd be interested to see performance relative to Intel machines.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- soganess 3y agoThe 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://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Telum_(microprocessor) https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/ibms-telum-mainframe-processor-introduces-new-cache-architecture/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/ibms-telum-mainframe...
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoIt'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.
- rbanffy 3y ago> 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.
- dun44 3y agoMainframes have to implement a fifty years old architecture, and I suspect they have vastly smaller engineering teams, since their market is orders of magnitude smaller than those of Intel or ARM. Also I seem to remember IBM being seriously hostile towards independent benchmarks. Also, if they were competitive wrt performance, people would be using them. In real life they are rarely found outside of financial institutions.
- zxspectrum1982 3y agoSUSE Linux and RHEL have been available for s390x for a long time, including of course PostgreSQL.
- chungy 3y agoThis article is about PostgreSQL's own official binaries. Debian-provided packages have likewise existed for s390x for years (and continue for i386 too, which the article mentions they don't do anymore).
- beebmam 3y agoI'm fairly certain IBM Cloud offers S390x as a platform for confidential computing, so there is a very good use case for this.