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My Raspberry Pi Thinks It's a Mainframe
- losethos 14y agoWhy don't YOU write doom for it without a GPU?
- diminish 14y agoWhat about a data center, consisting of millions of raspberry PIs?
- Ecio78 14y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPFSNu_QNs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPFSNu_QNs
- arethuza 14y agoAre there any scenarios where this would be preferable to virtualization?
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoClose: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_servers/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_...
- ticks 14y agoI have only recently started looking at the Raspberry Pi, one thing that struck me was the use of SD memory for storage... I have used USB sticks to boot Linux before and they only lasted a few months of continuous use. Perhaps I'm missing something? Other than that I'm impressed, the device has lots of potential.
- anthonyb 14y agoDon't use a swap partition. That's typically the cause of early flash death. I have an old EeePC 901, with 12GB of onboard flash - it's still going after 2-3 years of relatively heavy use.
- bandy 14y agoNot swapping and getting rid of Linux's ridiculously noisy (for a personal laptop) and duplicative logs and perhaps mounting with "-o noatime" will help a lot as well. Additionally, the SDD in your 901 isn't just a hunk of flash - it contains additional logic that will perform Wear Leveling on the physical flash modules, resulting in more write cycles before you see a failure. (Higher-capacity thumb drives also have wear levelers to fight against the OS's propensity to always allocate data sectors in the same order, but they're a different variety than those found in SSDs, from what I've read)
- lloeki 14y agoYou can always plug in a USB mass storage device and use the SD card as a readonly root FS, or even just /boot. And that's if the raspi can't boot straight from USB. That said my NSLU2 has been running Debian for years on a 2GB USB stick, swap included. There are a few Linux knobs you can turn to reduce writes a bit.
- jerf 14y ago"And that's if the raspi can't boot straight from USB." FAQ says it can not.
- silentbicycle 14y agoThe board is designed so that all the peripherals are likely to just be lying around - a spare SD card, a cell phone charger, an old TV if you don't have a monitor handy, etc.
- slug 14y agoMy old monitor doesn't have HDMI input. Reading text through the composite out on a old TV is painful. They should have used a gpu with DVI-I output, so that it would have digital and analog (VGA) output pins, in my opinion. Nevertheless I'm waiting for mine to arrive :)
- kibwen 14y agoShortly after our 3270 terminal attaches to Hercules the VM system starts to boot, or “IPL” to use the IBM parlance. Brilliant, I've wondered for a while now what my boss has meant every time he's told me that they're IPL'ing the mainframe and that I'll have to remount my exported NFS shares.
- gaius 14y ago"Initial Program Load", which actually makes more sense than "bootstrap".
- sammyo 14y agoIf you had been around that generation of systems and toggled in a 30 byte program in hex or octal that loaded a paper tape or card deck that then loaded the actual OS, bootstrap seemed a reasonable term.
- jacquesm 14y agoBootstrap actually makes some sense when you're toggling in a loader on a machine that has a bunch of switches, it certainly feels like you're trying to lift yourself up by your laces rather than that you're loading an initial program. http://oldcomputers.net/imsai8080.html http://oldcomputers.net/imsai8080.html Oh, and one bit wrong and you can start all over again... the scary thing is that once you've done it often enough you start to remember the sequences the same way you remember how to play a piece on the piano, in your muscle memory.
- its_so_on 14y agoIt's always amazing to see how people computed in the time of Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. just kidding...but I can't help but wonder if even the people who are kids now will realize this stuff isn't from the nineteenth century... I mean, just look at the device you're reading this on :) We've come a long, long way.
- dandrews 14y agoCouple of years ago I did this on my shiny new N900, and for a brief period owned one of the world's smallest (if not the smallest) MVS systems. Alas, time marches on and that N900 seems rather old-school now.
- seclorum 14y agoI once ported BCPL to the GP2X. BCPL came with an EDSAC simulator, so I used it as the test app for the BCPL port .. so for a while, I had an EDSAC in my pocket. ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gp2x http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gp2x XOX for the win!
- eslachance 14y agoGuys, if you ever encounter a woman with a t-shirt that says "Talk nerdy to me", I believe you will have her instantly jump on you and have wild sex, if you tell her exactly what seclorum just said. Which, by the way, I have absolutely no idea what it means. :|
- luser001 14y agoThis is the worst comment I've ever seen on HN. This amounts of borderline cyberbullying. IMHO. You really should apologize.
- derleth 14y ago> This amounts of borderline cyberbullying. I agree it doesn't belong here, but I don't get how it's cyberbullying or anything close to it. Unless you think calling someone 'nerdy' is a grave insult around here, which I also don't really think is the case.
- artmageddon 14y agoYour comment was not at all witty, and doesn't belong here.
- 14y ago
- iuguy 14y agoFor those that are interested, the IBM Mainframe family is a fascinating architecture, completely and totally with nothing in common with modern mid-range or microcomputing. MVS is the ancestor of a modern operating system, z/OS, also capable of running on hercules, albeit with much more by way of hardware requirements[1] (I wouldn't want to run it on a raspberry pi). IBM's licencing prohibits the installation of z/OS on anything other than IBM mainframe hardware, which in itself led to a bizarre situation where IBM, defender of open source projects and patent abuse decided to start abusing patents against an open source project[2] [1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRW4iPhCDSM&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRW4iPhCDSM&feature=relat... [2] - http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/04/ibm-breaks-oss-patent-promise-targets-mainframe-emulator/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/04/ibm-br... [2]
- ctdonath 14y agoLong ago I found an IBM 360 emulator written in 2 pages of APL and published in some technical magazine. Anyone recall this and have a copy? (I've found websites with copies of similar articles, but lacked the straight-up APL code.)
- dandrews 14y agoYou're not thinking of Falkoff/Iverson/Sussenguth's A Formal Description of SYSTEM/360, are you? http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/class.files.cs2321.html/falkoff.pdf http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/class.files.cs2321.html/...
- ctdonath 14y agoClose, but not quite. As I recall (some 20 years ago) it had two pages of actual APL code (not notation, real runnable code).
- ja27 14y agoIBM had their own P/390 systems that basically put a mainframe on a PCI card to go in a PC or RS/6000 host. There were also the FLEX-ES systems that were Linux-based mainframe emulators running on Intel hardware. IBM sanctioned and allowed this for long enough for a number of companies (including mine) to buy them, then pulled the plug on the program and forced everyone to buy real mainframe hardware instead.
- adestefan 14y agoWhile this is cute, a mainframe is so much more than just a CPU. The draw of a mainframe is the support for massive I/O and bulletproof hardware.
- Retric 14y agoOld school Manframes have poor IO by today's standards as in less than a mid range wireless access point. And, the software and hardware where ridiculously stable by today's standards but, if you look at mean time between failures in therms of operations preformed not just time they once again fall behind. PS: Still, to give an idea of why Manframes where considered such IO beasts a high end PC's IO is about ~1000x as fast (HDMI is 10.2 Gbit/s + USB + Gigabit Ethernet etc), but it's got ~1,000,000x the processing power.
- bradfa 14y agoYeah, but SD cards also have horrible IO by today's standards and they're commonly used for little boards like this. Up to 4x I/O channels running at 3MB/second for the mainframe would be considered pretty good for small (4 kiB to 16 kiB) file operations on almost all microSD cards today. edit: typo
- sophacles 14y agoOf course, if you don't pretend that mainframes stopped advancing, you see a different picture. Modern zSeries (or whatever new marketing they've come up with) have multiple 10Gbit interfaces to a network, and can keep them all fed. Not to mention special offload processors for AES and X509 certs, and of course hardware partitioning and virtualization built in. Mainframes are still pretty badass - a lot of stuff that is exciting and new in the server space is stuff that IBM was doing for decades in the Mainframe space. There is just something very cool about handling something on the order of 10^5 fully ACID transactions per second, while still allowing real time database querying and on-the-fly hardware failure tolerance.
- ori_b 14y agoThe levels of hardware failure tolerance are amazing. I believe that hot swap CPUs fit somewhere in that list, as does memory. (see the 'fault tolerance' section here: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/resiliency/datadriven/server.html#design http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/resiliency/datadr...)
- m0nty 14y agoBut still you can't actually buy a Raspberry Pi ...
- Karunamon 14y agoSure you can, you just won't receive it for 2-3 months ;)
- m0nty 14y agoIt's disappointing :( I work in education and would like to try this thing out for a variety of projects, but the delays in getting them to market mean I probably won't get one. There are alternatives, not least (for the very interesting original article) just setting up a Linux box and using Hercules, etc, on that. It's a real shame that supply problems risk putting a damper on the huge public interest and enthusiasm for the Raspberry Pi.
- ssmall 14y agoIts disappointing in the short term, but look at the big picture. All this extra interest and purchases from the private sector if handled correctly will let them buy in bigger bulks, twist more arms in manufacturing, and find and fix more bugs. In the long run getting this boards out to a wider audience will give you a more stable, feature-rich and cheaper product.
- m0nty 14y agoI hope that will be the case. My ultimate motivation is to get students interested in programming and all the other things (control tech, etc) a cheap expendable PC can facilitate. I could easily get 20 of these if they were available but getting one is tricky enough at the moment.
- delinka 14y agoI'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned attempting to supplant IBM's older mainframes with smaller units like Pi, Arduino or Bone. However, maybe it's generally known that ... you can't. Because IBM has the same hardware/software tying licensing arrangement that people decry Apple for having.
- spitfire 14y agoWhat is bone? ddg search doesn't find anything easily.
- dawson 14y agohttp://beagleboard.org/bone http://beagleboard.org/bone
- winestock 14y agoHe means the BeagleBone. It's an ARM-based single-board computer that fits in a mint tin. http://beagleboard.org/bone http://beagleboard.org/bone
- dredmorbius 14y agoI've been saving mint tins for something just like this....
- ericmoritz 14y agoA really neat project is the Erlang Embedded and a parallel project, Nerves. I imagine a little cluster of these things in my house :) http://www.erlang-solutions.com/news/1/entry/1307 http://www.erlang-solutions.com/news/1/entry/1307 http://nerves-project.org/ http://nerves-project.org/
- sethish 14y agoThe [Hercules System / 360](http://www.hercules-390.org/_ http://www.hercules-390.org/_ that the author mentions and links to is maintained by [Jay Maynard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Maynard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Maynard), ROFLcon alumni and better known as [Tron Guy](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tron-guy http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tron-guy).
- johnohara 14y agoThe author's comparison doesn't really work. The power of those IBM mainframes was in the entire architecture (SNA - System Network Architecture) not just the processing unit. Terminals such as the 3270 talked to cluster controllers that talked to batch controllers that talked to other controllers that fed the processor etc. (simplified). Data making it's way through the device chain was nothing for a 3 MIPS processor with 64 MB of internal memory and 3MB IO to handle. As far as IPL's were concerned, it was more common for the controllers to be IPL'd than it was for the processor. Because of heat and cooling issues, nobody ever wanted to shutdown the processing system or even let those boards deviate much from their operational temperature. Bad things always happened when they powered down and cooled off. Always. Raspberry PI is better compared to a PDP-11, a VAX, or a Data General (Soul of a New Machine).
- farnsworth 14y agoWhy would cooling off cause problems? Stories like this make me feel as far removed from my computing ancestors as I feel from my farming grandparents.
- sandfox 14y agoAs chips / boards / etc cool, they move and contract and (massive generalisation) this causes mechanical wear . I'm sure someone more versed in such stuff can give a detailed explanation of what can happen. (there are lots more side effects to power cycling gear as well)
- iuguy 14y agoAbsolutely correct on all counts. Incidentally, for those with a Raspberry PI who want to run old hardware emulators (and indeed those of us without who still want to run them), you can't bear SIMH[1] which will happily emulate a PDP-11, VAX or Data General computer amongst others. You can even run old Unix on it! [1] - http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ http://simh.trailing-edge.com/