[vox] NT on the mainframe?

[Rob Rogers]

On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 09:24:56AM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Fri 09 May 03,  9:18 AM, Ken Herron <Kherron@newsguy.com> opined:
> > --On Friday, May 09, 2003 08:28:49 -0700 "Eric D. Pierce" 
> > <epierce@surewest.net> wrote:
> > 
> > >If an IBM mainframe can run a Linux kernel that was written
> > >for x86 in a virtual mainframe OS partition (or whatever
> > >they call it), why couldn't it also run an NT kernel for
> > >x86?
> > 
> > It's my understanding that the IBM linux environment isn't an x86 
> > emulator. The instruction set and machine architecture used within the 
> > environment are the same as or close to the mainframe's actual 
> > architecture.
> > 
> > You'll recall he said you could run a single linux instance as the only 
> > OS on the host, for example.
> 
> however, you COULD run NT if you ran vmware from within a hosted linux
> OS.    :-P

Again, only if the hosted linux was running on x86 (or what looked like
x86). VMWare is not an x86 emulator, it is a virtual machine emulator.
It will only run on x86 hardware as most of what it does is pass the
instructions right on through to the processor, only trapping a few
specific things. (this is why it can seem so fast) Now you could run NT
from within bochs on a hosted Linux OS, because it _is_ an x86 machine
emulator.