interesting similarities to "hardware partitioning" of IBM mainframes

Posted Sep 21, 2025 7:19 UTC (Sun) by dale.hagglund (subscriber, #48536)
Parent article: Multiple kernels on a single system

IBM mainframes (I won't say for sure about modern ones, but certainly the the 370, 390, and compatible Amdahl systems I was aware of in the mid 80s at university) supported a feature where the hardware could be divided into "partitions", each of which could run a fully separate "real mode" OS instance. Again, I don't know this for sure, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there was some hardware help for controlling which cpus, memory, devices, etc, could be discovered by the os running in a particular partition. As I understand it, partitioning was commonly used for testing new releases of the os and related software, to separate production from dev development and test, and no doubt other reasons.

Anyway, this new multi-kernel work could be used in many different and useful ways, as others have already noted, but it's always interesting to see how essentially every "new" idea has antecedents in the past.

interesting similarities to "hardware partitioning" of IBM mainframes

Posted Sep 21, 2025 23:13 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Anyway, this new multi-kernel work could be used in many different and useful ways, as others have already noted, but it's always interesting to see how essentially every "new" idea has antecedents in the past.

There is a gazillion different potential reasons for that: the solution was in search of a problem, it was too expensive, it was not mature yet, it broke backwards compatibility too much, it was mature and successful for a while but displaced by less convenient but much cheaper commodity solutions, etc.

1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. The lone inventor and its eureka! moment is probably the least common case but it makes the best stories to read or watch and they massively skew our perception. Our tribal brain is hardwired for silver bullets and miracles and "allergic" to slow, global and real-world evolutions. Not just for science and technology, it's the same for economics, war, sociology, climate, etc.