{"id":14989,"date":"2019-09-19T02:00:30","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T09:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/?p=14989"},"modified":"2019-09-19T02:06:16","modified_gmt":"2019-09-19T09:06:16","slug":"ubuntu-on-the-new-linuxone-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/2019\/09\/ubuntu-on-the-new-linuxone-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Ubuntu on the new LinuxONE III"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months ago I visited the IBM offices in Poughkeepsie<\/a> to sync up with colleagues, record an episode of Terminal Talk<\/a>, and let\u2019s be honest, visit some mainframes. A lot of assembly still happens in Poughkeepsie, and they have a big client center with mainframes on display, including several inside a datacenter that they give tours of. I was able to see a z14 in operation, as well as several IBM LinuxONE<\/a> machines. Getting to tour datacenters is a lot of fun, and even though I wouldn\u2019t have meaningful technical interactions with them, there\u2019s something about seeing these massive machines that I work with every day in person that brings me a lot of joy.<\/p>\n

Now I have to go back! On September 12th, the newest mainframe was announced<\/a>, the IBM z15 and accompanying Linux version, the IBM LinuxONE III<\/a>. To celebrate, I joined my colleagues in the IBM Silicon Valley lab for a launch event watch party and, of course, cake.<\/p>\n

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I wrote a more in-depth article about the hardware of this machine for work here: Inside the LinuxONE III<\/a>. The key thing about it is that we\u2019ve gone from two versions of the LinuxONE (Rockhopper II and Emperor II), to just one, but one that fits inside a 19\u201d rack space like the Rockhopper II did and is expandable to up to four frames.<\/p>\n

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The processors are 5.2Ghz each, and in a fully decked out configuration one of these 4-frame systems can have up to 190 processors and 40 TB of RAM. It\u2019s a massively powerful machine. Add in on-chip crypto that we\u2019ve come to know and love on the mainframe, you have a really impressive data processing powerhouse.<\/p>\n

Now, I was brought on to the Z Ecosystem team because of my background with Linux, both in the Ubuntu community and broader experience with distributed systems, including OpenStack and Apache Mesos. That\u2019s because these mainframes don\u2019t just run z\/OS. The LinuxONE series of machines, the first of which was released in 2015, are exclusively Linux. Last week I wrote an article over on OpenSource.com about How Linux came to the mainframe<\/a>, where I talk about how this came to be. This morning the second part of that article was published, Linux on the mainframe: Then and now<\/a>, where I explore the formal entrance of major distributions into supporting the mainframe architecture. Ubuntu joined that fold with an announcement in 2016<\/a> that Ubuntu 16.04 had support for the mainframe (s390x architecture). Today, Ubuntu boasts the most s390x packages of all the officially supported distributions.<\/p>\n

All recent release of Ubuntu have supported s390x, so while they recommend the LTS releases, you can happily use Ubuntu 19.04 today to get the latest packages, and there are even more improvements in store for Ubuntu 19.10 coming out next month. When I chatted with Frank Heimes, who runs the Ubuntu on Big Iron blog (which you should totally check out!), he highlighted the following this for me with regard to Ubuntu support:<\/p>\n