On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 10:38:04AM +0100, Bellussi Giorgio wrote: > Hi all. > > I'm a poor boy :-) , so I'm allowed to ipl Linux only on a LPAR'ed G3 box with > only a 3172 as network device (neither OSA, nor CTC (dedicated to production)). > > Question 1. > Suse and Turbolinux distributions are supported only on G5 or G6 machines > (unlike intel flavours, which should work also with ancient 386!). > Does Red Hat for s390 will have the same limitations? > Question 2. > lcs.o (the network driver for "lan channel stations" like 3172) is still > distributed as OCO (Object Code Only) also under SRPMS directory. Is it > permitted by GPL license? > (the true question is: there will be some way to be sure the instructions of > lcs.o are supported by pre G4 cpu?) > BTW: I found a 2.2.15 kernel hacked for pre G3 machines. I tried to IPL it and > it worked fine (unlike Marist and SUSE, which hang at dasd initialization) until > the step of network setup. Linus Torvalds has defined a very strict interface for modules. Binary-only drivers are allowed that only use this interface, but experience will show that you often wish you had the source instead of depending on binary-only modules. :-) You only need the kernel,initrd and a parameter file to try if the kernel still supports your CPU. I personally think G3 should work fine with our kernel, but don't know for sure. cu, Florian La Roche
