Port to OS/390 mainframe USS?

Ulrich Weigand weigand at immd1.informatik.uni-erlangen.de
Wed Mar 21 14:43:00 CST 2001


James,

> Will there be a port of WINE to OS/390 mainframe USS? 
> LINUX runs fine under USS, so it would seem that WINE should run there as
> well.
> Has anyone done this yet? 

To clear up a possible misunderstanding first:  Linux for S/390
does *not* run under USS or under OS/390.

OS/390 is (one of) the standard operating system(s) used on S/390
mainframes.  One component of OS/390, the Unix System Services (USS),
provides an environment that allows to run certain Unix applications.
However, USS is not itself an operating system, just an ABI layer
on top of OS/390 (somewhat similar to the POSIX subsystem of 
Windows NT).

Linux for S/390, on the other hand, is a true port of the Linux
operating system to the S/390 hardware.  It runs directly on the
S/390 platform, *instead* of OS/390 or any other mainframe operating
system.

This has the effect that while USS is much more integrated into
the OS/390 environment, Linux on S/390 is much more similar to 
'real' Unix platforms.  Porting Unix or Linux applications to USS
is often non-trivial (e.g. gcc does not run on USS at all), while
porting to Linux on S/390 is most of the time just a recompile.

What I want to say by that is that a port of Wine to *USS* seems 
rather unlikely, given the difficulties I mentioned.  However, a port
to *Linux* on S/390 should really be possible, and some time ago
I already did a proof-of-concept implementation.

Of course, a port of Wine to any non-Intel hardware means just a
port of the Wine *library* at the moment, as Wine does not contain
a Intel processor emulator and cannot run Windows/Intel binaries
on non-Intel hardware.  James (Hatheway) has already explained this ...

Bye,
Ulrich

-- 
  Dr. Ulrich Weigand
  weigand at informatik.uni-erlangen.de




More information about the wine-devel mailing list