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Ubuntu and the new IBM LinuxONE III LT2

Back in September I wrote about Ubuntu on the new LinuxONE III. For the release of this new mainframe, there were balloons, and cake, and we had a great time celebrating. With Shelter in Place orders spreading throughout the US, we don’t have cake this time, but we do have a new hardware release!

The IBM LinuxONE III LT2 follows in the footsteps of the initial release, with support for the great PCIe cards that the LT1 has, but aimed at the mid-range market. Most notably, that means it only comes in a single frame version (versus the option of up to four frames for the LT1), the processor cores run at 4.5ghz, instead of 5.2ghz, and they are all air-cooled.

I wrote more about the hardware here: Inside the new IBM z15 T02 and LinuxONE III LT2.

What’s particularly notable here is that there’s an Ubuntu LTS release coming out next week. So, in addition to all the LinuxONE III features that Ubuntu 19.10 has for the LinuxONE, this new release will also have support for a new Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for IBM Z, Secure Execution. If you’re interested in Secure Execution specifically, I wrote about that, too: Technical Overview of Secure Execution for Linux on IBM Z. For those who are curious adaptions in the kernel, qemu, and s390-tools were made for Ubuntu 20.04 to support Secure Execution on both LinuxONE III models, and Linux running on the IBM z15 and the new z15 T02.

I’m looking forward to the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release next week and all the latest goodies that brings to the s390x mainframe platform. I’ll be doing an overview blog post next week, but keep an eye on the Ubuntu on Big Iron blog for an in-depth update of all the work that has gone into this LTS release.