Last updated on:
Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Software

• Linux/390 Distributions
• Linux/390 Patches
• Hercules - An S/390 Hardware Emulator

Information

• Large numbers of links
• Linux/390 HOWTOs
• IBM's Linux/390 pages
• Distribution Contents
• IBM VM and Linux Resources
• Linux man pages
• Notes & Observations
• Top 10 reasons to run Linux on VM
• Linux/390 at Princeton University
• i/370 Port, aka Bigfoot
• linuxvm.org Archives

Community

• Community Members
• Linux-390 Listserv
• Linux/390 Presentations
• Linux/390 Subscribers
• Linux/390 Survey Results

News

• Enterprise Linux Today
• Linux Journal
• Linux Today
• Linux World
• Kernel Traffic

Fun

• Ubersoft
• User Friendly

Credits

• Cast of characters

Linux for S/390 and zSeries, also known as Linux/390, is the native port of Linux to the S/390 and zSeries hardware platforms. It runs on the bare hardware, in an LPAR and as a VM, or z/VM guest.

LinuxVM.org is the official home of the Linux/390 project. The purpose of the project is to provide a central source of Linux/390 information and software, and to explore the possibilities of Linux and CP integration or interoperation.

The list of Linux/390 Redbooks was getting a little too unwieldy to remain on the front page, so it has been moved to its own page.

04/01/2008 - 2 more Linux and z/VM presentations from SHARE 110 in Orlando, Florida have been added to the presentations page. These are likely to be the last ones contributed.
http://linuxvm.org/Present/index.html#share110

04/01/2008 - The Linux-390 mailing list archives for March of 2008 have been added to the site.
http://linuxvm.org/archives/index.html

03/31/2008 - An updated version of the mksles9root.sh script that supports SLES9 SP4 has been added to the Patches page.
http://linuxvm.org/Patches/index.html#mksles9root

03/24/2008 - The Linux-390 mailing list archives for January and February of 2008 have been added to the site.
http://linuxvm.org/archives/index.html

03/14/2008 - 10 more Linux and z/VM presentations from SHARE 110 in Orlando, Florida have been added to the presentations page. There may be a few more come in, but I'm not so sure about that. Keep an eye out here, just in case.
http://linuxvm.org/Present/index.html#share110

03/11/2008 - 30 Linux and z/VM related presentations from SHARE 110 in Orlando, Florida have been added to the presentations page. I'm anticipating more as some others trickle in. Keep an eye out here.
http://linuxvm.org/Present/index.html#share110

01/26/2007 - A new Linux Kernel mailing list has been set up at vger.kernel.org for anyone that is interested in following or participating in mainframe Linux development. The traffic will consist mostly of technical discussions about kernel development for the mainframe platform. You can subscribe at the link below.
http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-s390
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.64285

09/09/2006 - The presentations page has been updated with presentation from SHARE 107 in Baltimore Maryland. There are a number of sessions included that have never been given before at SHARE.
http://linuxvm.org/Present/#share107

05/11/2006 - Mark Post announced that he was now now able to provide Linux/390 DVDs for people that want them:

Thanks to the vast generosity of John McKown, I now have a DVD burner on one of my Intel Slackware systems. As I said in a previous post, I am now willing to provide DVDs of any freely available Linux/390 distribution that you can find .iso files for. (If you want one for Slack/390, I'll generate one and burn it for you.)

There will be a nominal fee, to cover postage, media, and a small piece of my time. I'm guessing USD $5.00 or so until I have an opportunity to actually send one out. After that, I may adjust the cost. If so, I'll let everyone know.

So, anyone that would like to order one, please contact me OFF LIST, and we'll work out the details.

Thanks again to John for his generosity,

05/03/2005 - Adam Thornton recommended installing Sarge and Debian-installer, instead of Debian Woody. "You'll get a much-closer-to-current Debian system that way. I haven't actually tried RC3 myself, but rc2 worked fine. I've heard some reports that virtual Hipersockets don't work but I have not been able to reproduce that.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.54200
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-s390/rc3/images/

04/29/2005 - A list member wanted to verify that some new SLES9 installs had actually picked up the Service Pack 1 maintenance. Mike MacIsaac said that a "uname -a" command should show a kernel level of 2.6.5-7.97. Ihno Krumreich of SUSE recommended using the SPident command. He said that "SPident -v -v" will show information on which packages are at which service pack level.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.54182

04/28/2005 - Gerhard Hiller of IBM reported the following updates on the DeveloperWorks web site:

• April 2004 stream
  • Kernel 2.6.5: Recommended kernel patch with bug fixes
• June 2003 stream
  • Kernel 2.4.21: Recommended kernel patch with bug fixes
• New OCOs for Red Hat
  • tape_3590 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (v. 4) (31-bit and 64-bit) kernel 2.6.9-5.0.5.EL (2005-04-19)
  • tape_3590 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (v. 3) (31-bit and 64-bit) kernel 2.4.21-27.0.4.EL (2005-04-22)

04/22/2005 - Robert Nix reported the resolution to a problem with communicating between DB2 systems on Linux/390 and z/OS that had been driving him crazy.

On roughly half the requests [from the Linux guest], Work Load Manager would route the request via XCF to the other half of the sysplex, which would process the request, and then send it.... Where? I[t] had no idea how to reach the source of the request, because the network the request came from existed only inside the CEC of the other half of the sysplex. Since it didn't know where to find the IP address, the response got thrown out to the defaultnet IP address. With some research, we figured out that it actually made it all the way back into the z/VM box. But the z/VM TCPIP stack had no idea that the hipersocket network existed either, and so it went to (you guessed it) the defaultnet address. Which bounced it back into z/VM. Which... Well, you get the picture.

Adding a route to the z/VM stack to route the request back into the Linux image completed the circle and allowed all the requests to be processed, but is not the optimal solution. I'm currently negotiating with our networking people to get a route put into the second z/OS to route things back across XCF to the hipersocket. At that point, I think things will be as optimal as I can get them.

04/22/2005 - A list member wanted to move a Linux/390 system from being a z/VM guest to running in an LPAR. Jim Sibley warned that if minidisks had been used for the guest's DASD that it would not work. In that case, data would have to be copied to new volumes before trying to IPL the system in the LPAR.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.54090

04/22/2005 - In response to what has become a common complaint when trying to install SLES9 systems, Jerry Whitteridge reported that the SLES9 FTP installation "requires a relative path. I had to specify ../../SLES9/INSTALLROOT in the ftp path instead of /SLES9/INSTALLROOT. After that everything worked OK -- it appears that the ftp server drops you into /home/&UID and that it uses that as the root for the FTP directories." Tom Duerbusch got essentially the same result by turning on the chroot option on his FTP server. He was then able to specify an absolute path instead of a relative one, since the FTP servers was then treating the home directory as "/" instead of "/path/to/homedir" The error that is reported when the path is not specified correctly is "Cannot read package data from installation media. Error no proposal."
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.54092

04/21/2005 - In response to a question about creating a gcc cross-compiler for Linux/390, several people had some suggestions. Jochen Friedrich recommended reading the page at bytesex.org. Rob van der Heij said that he had good results from Kegel's crosstool. He warned that the "challenge is to get the runtime libraries at the right level with the proper patches to build against." Mark Post commented that the bytesex.org page had "cheated" by copying the glibc libraries from another source, and agreed that building those were very difficult. Carsten Otte said that the Debian packages from debian.speedblue.org has worked nicely for him.
http://linux.bytesex.org/cross-compiler.html
http://kegel.com/crosstool/
http://debian.speedblue.org/

04/21/2005 - In response to a question about creating an installation directory structure from the multiple Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 AS CD images, NoëL Antonio said that the Red Hat instructions did mean exactly what they said: "You can't go wrong if you do as the guide says: (repeat for each CD-ROM):

1. Insert CD-ROM
2. mount /mnt/cdrom
3. cp -a /mnt/cdrom/RedHat <target-directory> - where the <target-directory> is one single directory

04/20/2005 - Mark Post reported an article that talked about Resolvo Systems contributing its "MoveOver Windows-to-Linux migration tool" to the open source community. A Sourceforge project has been created as well. Mark noted that even though the tool was intended to be used to migrate desktop files, it might be possible to use it to move server data as well.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.54062
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS9812962808.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmoveover/

04/19/2005 - David Boyes noted that the Sine Nomine "tape mount daemon and some sample execs to label tapes for use with the ANSI/IBM SL support in Bacula 1.37 are now part of the Bacula distribution. If you've been holding off due to support from the Bacula team, now it's there...8-)"
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.54060

04/19/2005 - In response to a question about migrating Samba user and machines accounts to an LDAP server on SLES9, Mike MacIsaac recommended using YaST to do the setup, and referred to his two presentations from SHARE 104 for more information. David Boyes mentioned that the Samba HOWTO document on samba.org has a very detailed cookbook on the account migration aspect. Mike warned that the lmPasswd and ntPasswd fields are very important.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.54035
http://linuxvm.org/Present/#share104

04/15/2005 - Rich Smrcina announced that he has written a syslog daemon for VSE. "It's sole purpose is to receive syslog messages from a Linux (or any compatible Unix) system. When a message is received it is displayed on the VSE system console. Console automation software can then use the message to trigger an action, for instance, to submit a job."
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53992
http://www.vmassist.com/rs_samples/

04/15/2005 - Adam Thornton of Sine Nomine Associates announced that version 0.5 of SysVInit has been released. "Improvements over 0.4 include support for VSWITCH coupling for Linux guests and global VM performance settings. Barring the discovery of major bugs, this is likely to be the last release before 1.0."

Adam did warn of one know issue. "SysVInit generates log files on AUTOLOG1's 191-disk, but does not automatically clean them up. So every so often you need to purge them manually, or your 191-disk will fill up and then PROP will fail to run. This behavior has been present in every release of SysVInit, so if you're running it at all, you should probably check your 191-disk and clean it up if necessary."
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53994
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53998
http://sinenomine.net/vm/s5i

04/14/2005 - Adam Thornton noted that a new version of OpenMosix was out that moved a lot of the patch from the kernel to userspace.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53932
http://freshmeat.net/projects/openmosix/?branch_id=21918&release_id=193392

04/13/2005 - Neale Ferguson was the first to report the appearance of the Open Source version of Object Rexx (orexx), which was contributed by IBM. Neale also commented that it compiled cleanly on his SLES9 system, but he had to make a slight change to the spec file for the RPM:

--- oorexx.spec.old     2005-04-13 13:11:53.452401703 -0400
+++ oorexx.spec 2005-04-13 12:38:27.262401703 -0400
@@ -94,15 +94,15 @@
 /usr/local/lib/ooRexx/librexxapi.la
 /usr/local/lib/ooRexx/librxsock.la
 /usr/local/lib/ooRexx/librxmath.la
 /usr/local/lib/ooRexx/librxregexp.la
 /usr/local/lib/ooRexx/librexxutil.la
-/usr/local/man/man1/rexx.1
-/usr/local/man/man1/rexxc.1
-/usr/local/man/man1/rxsubcom.1
-/usr/local/man/man1/rxqueue.1
-/usr/local/man/man1/rxmigrate.1
+/usr/local/man/man1/rexx.1.gz
+/usr/local/man/man1/rexxc.1.gz
+/usr/local/man/man1/rxsubcom.1.gz
+/usr/local/man/man1/rxqueue.1.gz
+/usr/local/man/man1/rxmigrate.1.gz
 /usr/local/include/rexx.h
 /usr/local/share/ooRexx/rexx.sh
 /usr/local/share/ooRexx/rexx.csh
 /usr/local/share/ooRexx/*.rex
 /usr/local/share/ooRexx/readme

04/13/2005 - Vic Cross reported a problem with his Guest LAN not working after applying SP1 to his SLES9 system. The solution seemed to be putting on addtional z/VM maintenance. Dennis Musselwhite took the opportunity to point people to the IBM web page that deals with virtual networking, including appropriate CP maintenance levels.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.54007
http://www.vm.ibm.com/virtualnetwork/

04/13/2005 - In response to a question about how to use IPTABLES to set up a Linux firewall, Istvan Nemeth recommended a website that talks about this.
http://www.knowplace.org/netfilter/index.html

04/08/2005 - In a discussion about how to add a new network interface to a SLES9 system without using YaST, David Kreuter talked about copying the configuration files from /etc/sysconfig/network, and then modifying them. Hannes Reinecke of SUSE added this comment: "And do not forget to copy over the hardware configuration file in /etc/sysconfig/hardware/hwcfg-XXX and modify it with the appropriate parameters. Have a look in /etc/sysconfig/hardware/skel for samples. Full description can be found in /usr/share/doc/packages/sysconfig/README.s390."
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53836

04/07/2005 - In response to a question about possibly using CTC connections over FICON, David Boyes recommended reading a paper by Shimon Lebowitz on just how to do that.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53816
http://sinenomine.net/node/465

04/06/2005 - In response to a request for any information about NJE/RJE interoperability tools that would allow a Linux/390 system to submit jobs to z/OS, David Boyes of Sine Nomine announced that they had developed commercial tool to do just that.
"We've developed a NJE implementation for Linux on (Intel, PPC, zSeries), Solaris, AIX, and HP/UX. This gadget allows use of standard NJE networking capabilities for file transfer, printing and interactive messaging to communicate bidirectionally from any of the above OSes to/from NJE-enabled operating systems as a peer. Full NJE routing and multi-stream capability is supported, as is SENDFILE and msg support (and as soon as I finish the CTC testing, I'll add support for syslog message log transfer to PROP or other NJE-based tools).

"The current implementation supports TCPNJE with RSCS and VSE; a maintenance release in August (we're still testing with some of the more esoteric stuff) will support real CTC connections. It is supported for LPAR and VM guests, and the CTC version will support JES(2,3), and TPF as well. It can be installed on an existing Linux or Unix system, or supplied as a appliance (OS and application together). The CTC version supports up to 32 CTC connections and a large number (limited by storage) of TCPNJE connections. No VTAM or other communications engine (such as CS for Linux) is required -- this is a completely native implementation.

"The implementation includes cmdline utilities for MSG and SENDFILE, mail and printer interface, and a API programming library. The TCPNJE support uses SSL encryption for TCP connections (compatible with the SSL Server Enabler) if you enable it and are running on an OS with SSL wrapper support."
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53783

04/05/2005 - In response to a request for how to get a copy of SLES9 SP1, Mark Post stated that a z/Journal article he had written tells how to get a no-cost trial license (including maintenance) for either SUSE or Red Hat.
http://www.zjournal.com/Article.asp?ArticleId=1002

04/05/2005 - In response to a request for examples of successful migration of Linux applications from Intel to Linux/390, Doug Fairobent said that ACTS Corporation was one such case.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53722
http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/os/linux/stories.html
http://www.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/NAVO-4VY2NS?OpenDocument

04/05/2005 - Gerhard Hiller of IBM reported the following updates on the DeveloperWorks web site:

• April 2004 stream
  • kernel 2.6.5 recommended kernel patch with bug fixes

04/04/2005 - Christian Bornträger of IBM said that he would look into a performance problem of a SLES9 user that was seeing a 30 second delay during some system IPLs when the hotplug code was detecting 32 processors. This was happening on a Multiprise 7060 with 1 CPU. Christian said that VM APAR VM63654 should be installed on any system that was going to be using CPU hotplug, but a 30 second delay could probably be improved upon.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53713

03/31/2005 - Peter Webb reported a short article that talked about Deutsche Bahn, Europe's biggest railway, migrating workload from 300 Intel servers to Linux/390.
http://www.theregister.com/2005/03/31/deutsche_bahn_ibm_suse_server_consolidation/

03/28/2005 - Jim Sibley spotted a new IBM document on transitioning from Linux/390 2.4-based systems to 2.6. The IBM Linux on zSeries page says "This book provides guidance for those who want take advantage of the latest Linux features, moving from the Linux 2.4 kernel to the Linux 2.6 kernel using the SUSE Linux or Red Hat distributions."
http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/os/linux/
http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/library/techpapers/pdf/lnux-14mg.pdf

03/26/2005 - Neale Ferguson has uploaded a package of mono-1.1.5 RPMs for S/390 to the site. It's on the large side (~21MB), so be patient if you're on a dial up line.
http://linuxvm.org/Patches/

03/25/2005 - Steve Gentry spotted a draft version of a new Redbook, "z/VM and Linux on zSeries: From LPAR to Virtual Servers in Two Days, SG24-6695." The abstract states:
This redbook describes how to roll your own Linux virtual servers on IBM zSeries under z/VM. It adopts a cookbook format that provides a clearly documented set of procedures for installing and configuring z/VM in an LPAR and then installing and customizing Linux. You will need a zSeries logical partition (LPAR) with associated resources, z/VM 5.1 media, and a Linux distribution. This book is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES9) for zSeries, and both 31-bit and 64-bit distributions are addressed.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53538
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg246695.html

03/24/2005 - Neale Ferguson and Mark Post spotted some news coming out of Novell's Brainshare conference. The "Department of Transportation for the State of Oregon is migrating critical components of its driver's license management system to Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server running on an IBM zSeries mainframe."

Steven Adams of ODOT provided a little more information: "Actually we have been running a bit longer on that system but the headline is a little misleading (the entire release explains it in detail). The Linux piece is a single, critical, component of the entire licensing system. When we originally spec'd it out we knew that the aged, vintage, OS2 system had to go and the cost of replacing that component with an Windows system would be costly (roughly 120k) we took it on in our shop. Turned out to be a pretty quick infrastructure piece and it's been solid and secure since I finished it up. It was a natural fit since all of the other system components, except the workstations, are CICS/HFS based."
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53505
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53506
http://os.newsforge.com/os/05/03/23/0128254.shtml
http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2005/03/pr05033.html

03/23/2005 - Gerhard Hiller of IBM reported the following updates on the DeveloperWorks web site:

• April 2004 stream
  • kernel 2.6.5 recommended new features and bug fixes
  • s390-tools 1.4.0 with new features
  • New and updated manuals:
    • "Device Drivers, Features, and Commands" - updated with descriptions of new features
    • "How to use Execute-in-Place Technology with Linux on z/VM" - new for this stream
• June 2003 stream
  • zfcp HBA API library 1.2 on the "Useful add-ons" page
  • An updated "Device Drivers and Installation Commands" manual with descriptions of how to use recent hardware features.

03/21/2005 - Neale Ferguson found a new IBM Redpiece titled "Linux on zSeries: Samba-3 Performance Observations." The abstract states "This Redpaper was developed to provide readers with basic performance guidelines for Samba Version 3.0.5 on zSeries Linux and to give background information that can be used in configuring and tuning the Samba V3 environment. The data collected was developed using an IBM internal workload generator to simulate a heavy transaction load. The paper identifies parameters for optimum performance of Samba V3."
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp3988.html

03/21/2005 - Neale Ferguson has uploaded a new version of his cpint program, version 2.3.0. This version is for 2.6 kernels only. According to the change log, this version:

• Fixes a problem when 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system attempt to use the ioctl call
• Fixes a build problem with diag 0 driver on 64-bit systems
• Registers with sysfs so that it can come under management of udev

03/17/2005 - Neale Ferguson has uploaded a package of mono-1.1.4 RPMs for S/390 to the site. It's on the large side (~20MB), so be patient if you're on a dial up line.
http://linuxvm.org/Patches/

03/17/2005 - Dave Jones contributed a presentation on "Accessing LINUX file systems from CMS" that he gave at the Metropolitan VM Users Association in January. It has been added to the presentations page on this site.
http://linuxvm.org/Present/

03/15/2005 - The "Binary Distributions" information from the left side of the main page has been removed, completely reworked, and transferred to a new page on the site. This should bring the page completely up to date in terms of what distributions are available for the mainframe, and which ones are being kept updated, etc.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53300
http://linuxvm.org/Info/distros.html

03/15/2005 - A z/Journal article, written by Mark Post, on commercial and no-cost Linux/390 distributions is now available online. He says "Unfortunately, it was submitted for publication well before I knew that the S/390[x] version of Tao Linux wasn't being maintained any longer. s/tao/centos/ as needed."
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53298
http://www.zjournal.com/Article.asp?ArticleID=1002&DepartmentID=26

03/15/2005 - David Boyes announced that the presentations from yesterdays Hillgang meeting were now available on Sine Nomine's web site. Pointers to them have also been added to the presentations page of this site.
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.53321
http://sinenomine.net/vm/hillgang-15-mar-2005
http://linuxvm.org/Present/