Re: [IBMiOSS] AIX Toolbox gets more stuff, YUM anyone?

"OpenSource" <opensource-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 07/15/2016
02:10:04 PM:

From: Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>
To: IBMi Open Source Roundtable <opensource@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 07/15/2016 02:10 PM
Subject: Re: [IBMiOSS] AIX Toolbox gets more stuff, YUM anyone?
Sent by: "OpenSource" <opensource-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

I think a OBS for IBM i holds a lot of promise. I've signed up for an
account and looking through some of the docs. Do you envision cross
compiling or making an IBM i appliance(n1) to compile directly on IBM i?

Cross compiling is a pain. I'd rather get the build hosts/workers running
directly on IBM i. Getting the web frontend and the rest of the servers
running on IBM i is not much of a priority for now, though eventually it
would be good to get those servers running on IBM i as well. You can see a
diagram of all the servers involved here:
http://openbuildservice.org/help/manuals/obs-reference-guide/cha.obs.admin.html#cha.obs.admin.components


Highest priority being the Build Host / Worker, since that's what's needed
to actually build the packages for IBM i. The rest of the servers can be
deployed easily using the downloadable VM image:
http://openbuildservice.org/download/other/ or installing from the ISO.

I see the s390x(n2) has used OBS, so maybe there's hope this could be

used

for IBM i (though I don't know if s390x is Power chip based).

s390x is definitely not POWER based. It's the 64-bit architecture used on
z Systems mainframes (latest of which is the z13). You can find out more
about it's architecture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture


One thing to keep in mind is that they're using this to build RPMs for
Linux on z, so it's fairly similar to how they build RPMs for x86 or PPC
or ARM. They do have a different mechanism to start up a build environment
(z Systems don't support XEN virtualization, so they use the native VM
implementation instead). For us, we'd be building on an already supported
architecture (ppc/ppc64), but for a currently unsupported operating system
(AIX/PASE).

Aaron Bartell
litmis.com - Services for open source on IBM i