[Beowulf] Oh.. IBM eats Red Hat

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 15:45:32 -0400, you wrote:

>How well has Linux been supporting IBM's POWER processors? I would 
>imagine pretty well, since the Linux community always seems eager to run 
>on new hardware.

Quite well, but it really isn't community driven.

Fedora has both PPC64 and PPC64LE available to download, though the
PPC64 is being phased out I believe.

The bigger problem is that while the OS is reasonable about all you
can really say about the rest of the software is that it compiles -
the lack of affordable hardware seriously restricts the testing and
development that occurs.

>Could it be that the Linux community hasn't been quick enough in 
>accepting IBM's contributions to Linux to support POWER, so IBM decided 
>to buy the largest member of the community to fix that?
>
>Or, could it be that IBM didn't have enough Linux expertise in-house to 
>support POWER on Linux, so they decided to buy a lot of expertise?

This is purely a cloud play, and that is one of the reasons for
concern.

IBM has been in decline for a while, and the stock markets aren't
entirely happy with the declining revenue for a number of years now.

So this is an attempt to reverse things at IBM by getting into the
Amazon AWS/Google Cloud/Microsoft Azure business which is a growing
market.