Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System

[Mike Ross]

If you want to see how it works on bigger iron, here's a rare beast
indeed: my Application Starterpak 3000 - internal IBM codename
'Warthog'. A real S/390 in a half-height chassis. First video is a
power-up; let it play to the end and it segues into the next video,
IPLing the beast!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytMgyrZm87A

Cheers

Mike

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 6:43 AM, Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 8/6/15 11:05 AM, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 12:41 PM, Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Back to the MP 3000.  There are a number of CPUs in the box.  Two are the
>>> most
>>> obvious: the SBC running OS/2 and the actual S/390 CPU.  However, there
>>> is
>>> another
>>> S/390 CPU in the box as well.  It is not visible (at least directly) to
>>> S/W.
>>> It is responsible
>>> for providing the high performance I/O capabilities (like native disk
>>> access
>>> and making
>>> them appear as conventional channel attached devices instead of RAID-5
>>> SSA
>>> drives).
>>> The OS/2 SBC is there to emulate some of the slower devices (card
>>> reader/punch,
>>> direct attached 3270s, etc).
>>
>> So the OS/2 computer is actually a component of the mainframe's
>> control processor, not a separate PC?
>
> In various other S/390 and z/Series machines, there is a laptop that is the
> "service element" with
> special S/W (now I think on Linux).  On the MP3000, it is a single board
> computer that is on what
> looks like a big PCI card.  By it's nature it is hooked into various parts
> of the MP3000 system through
> the various other things that sit on the PCI bus.  Note that the PCI bus is
> shared between the SBC
> and the other parts of the MP3000.
>
> If you don't fire up the system element software the OS/2 system would
> appear as a somewhat
> "normal" PC with a bunch of special device drivers.
>
> There's a great diagram (too complicated to reproduce in ASCII art) that
> illustrates all of the major
> components in the MP3000.  It's located in the IBM Redbook "Multiprise 3000
> Technical Introduction".
> It's Figure 1 on page 8 of the redbook.  This is a really great introduction
> on the MP3000.
>
> TTFN - Guy
>



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