Josef “Jeff” Sipek

I guess I should mention it here…

Almost 6 months ago, I wrote up another howto: Installing CentOS 4.x under z/VM (the first one being Installing Debian under Hercules).

After a couple of days of trying to figure out why HVF didn’t want to IPL under z/VM, I finally managed to find out that z/VM is trying to act like a real 3215 printer-keyboard console, and refusing to do Sense-ID. It just rejects it. Grrr. So I set up a “device blacklist” where I say that device number 0009 is a 3215 console. It works well enough. This is what things look like on a real mainframe :)

ipl c clear
HVF version 0.13
 Memory:
    4096 kB/page
    131072 kB
    32768 pages
    PSA for each CPU     0..1024 kB
    nucleus              1024..4096 kB
    struct page array    4096..4608 kB
    generic pages        4608..131072 kB
 Devices:
    3215-00 @ 0009 (sch 10003)
    3390-12 @ 0190 (sch 10004)
    3390-12 @ 019d (sch 10005)
    3390-12 @ 019e (sch 10006)
    3390-12 @ 0191 (sch 10007)
    3390-12 @ 0192 (sch 10008)
 Scheduler:
    no task max

Shiny isn’t it? Subchannels 0-2 are missing because the devices (card reader, punch, and printer) don’t support Sense-ID, but I haven’t bothered to set up the “blacklist” entries because I won’t need these devices anytime soon.

Today, I got to use z/VM 5.2 a whole lot (well, I didn’t do all that much, but considering that I never typed a single command in z/VM — only VM/370 — it was a whole lot of using :) ). Long story, short, z/VM is totally amazingly awesome.

Here’s an image that I found on IBM’s website: