OpenSolaris for System z
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software development |
| Products | OpenSolaris for System z |
OpenSolaris for System z was a discontinued adaptation of the OpenSolaris OS tailored for the IBM System z mainframe series, developed by Sine Nomine Associates.
History
Originating from Solaris, initially launched by Sun Microsystems in 1991, OpenSolaris had its source code released publicly in 2005, facilitating the creation of various new distributions. In July 2006, Sine Nomine initiated the porting of OpenSolaris to IBM mainframes under the project title Sirius. By April 2007, updates on this effort were showcased at IBM's System z Technical Expo.
Towards the end of 2007, Sine Nomine presented OpenSolaris operating on IBM System z using z/VM at the Gartner Data Center Conference, announcing plans for an imminent release. A functional demonstration was also provided at the SHARE conference in August 2008, with public testing anticipated shortly thereafter.
The initial public prototype appeared in October 2008; however, it lacked certain functionalities such as DTrace, Solaris Containers, and NFS server support. This port was distributed freely under the same open source license as other OpenSolaris editions, granting full access to source code without any proprietary components.
From a technical standpoint, this port necessitated a 64-bit z/Architecture IBM System z mainframe (System z9 or newer) because it relied on particular processor instructions. It required paravirtualization capabilities available in z/VM version 5.3 or later and depended on network DIAGNOSE instruction support provided through specific PTFs. The operating system could not function directly on bare metal or logical partitions without z/VM. In November 2008, IBM authorized the use of IFL processors for running OpenSolaris workloads.
Development halted by March 2010 following Oracle’s withdrawal of support and denial of access to essential closed-source components, which effectively terminated the project.
See also
External links
- OpenSolaris Project: System z (project site and source code)
- Sine Nomine Associates
- OpenSolaris for System z (downloadable binaries)