Re: V5R2 Quality - Notes from the field needed -- MIDRANGE-L

Joe,

As you no doubt know there are only two ways for an 'old' OS to run on a 'new' piece of hardware. a) the hardware emulates older hardware (i.e. 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II Pentium III Pentium IV... how far do they think that's going to go???) or the software gets a boost to support the new hardware. (i.e. the february 2003 release of V5R2). The hardware emulation trick runs out of gas fairly quickly because that path offers no additional capability, only speed. This is why Windoze 3.11 was the end of it's ilk and WinDOHs 95 came into existence - to run the chips (mostly :-) in their native mode.

As I recall the 7xx family was introduced 'sans Software' by keeping the processor chips the same and just running them faster. This was mostly a Y2K issue so as not to force customers to upgrade their OS in 1999. IBM has also played the PTF game in the past and is likely to do so at times in the future. Usually though they save the big hardware upgrades for release time as the number and complexity of the PTFs can get quite large if enough new hardware is being supported. LPAR exacerbates the problem because of the desire to support multiple releases on one piece of hardware. The biggest hurdle is that fact that ALL partitions use the CPU so when you upgrade the system unit you've affected all partitions. Hence the solution to your problem is to stay on an old CPU and create a partition for each OS you want to support.

- Larry

Joe Pluta wrote

I am not trying to get into the LPAR dicussion; that's a little beyond me
(although not being able to run multiple versions of OS/400 on one machine
reduces even further the relevance of LPAR to me).

However, I thought that one of the fundamental ideas of OS/400 was that you
could slip new hardware underneath the operating system without disturbing
it.  I thought the horizontal and vertical microcode was supposed to allow
exactly this sort of thing.  Haven't we had processor upgrades before that
didn't require an upgrade to a new version of the operating system?

Just wondering.  Because if you're saying each new version of hardware
requires new software, then OS/400 has lost one of the major benefits that I
(evidently mistakenly) thought it had.

Joe

--
Larry Bolhuis           | IBM eServer Certified Systems Expert
Vice President          |     iSeries Technical Solutions V5R2, V5R1, V4R5...
Arbor Solutions, Inc.   |     iSeries LPAR Technical Solutions V5R2
(616) 451-2500          |     e-business for AS/400 V4R2
(616) 451-2571 -fax     | IBM eServer Certified Systems Specialist
lbolhuis@xxxxxxxxxx     |     iSeries System Administrator for OS/400 V5R2
www.arbsol.com          |     RPG IV Developer
                       |     iSeries System Command Operations V5R2
                       |     Client Access


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