New Release: RHEL 8.5 on IBM Z

RHEL 8.5 is out, see the press release here! It ships, among others:

• s390-tools v2.16 (renamed to s390utils), including
• HiperSockets Converged Interface support
• Support for transparent data set conversion in zdsfs
• zkey
• usability enhancements
• storing of LUKS2 passphrases
  
• pkey support for EP11 and CCA ECC protected keys
• smc-tools v1.6, which includes, among others
• Statistics for SMC-D and SMC-R
• New command smc_chk
  
• openCryptoki v3.16
• ep11 token: Support attribute bound keys
• ep11 token: Protected key support
• Allow to exchange key objects between applications using the CCA host library and applications using openCryptoki with CCA token
  

For a detailed list of Linux on Z-specific changes, see the release notes.

IBM-specific documentation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 is available at IBM Documentation here (in particular: Device Drivers, Features and Commands on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5).

New Community: Compass L

Do you know Compass L yet...? This community offers a great opportunity to interact with other users, developers and architects of Linux and KVM on IBM Z!

For further information, see the flyer below, or head over right away and join the community here.

.NET 6.0 is now supported on IBM Z and LinuxONE!

Thanks to a joined effort of IBM, RedHat, Microsoft, and Sine Nomine Associates, as well as the .NET and Mono open source communities, .NET 6 is now available for IBM Z and LinuxONE.

.NET 6.0 for IBM Z and LinuxONE can be obtained via:

• .NET 6.0 RPM packages in the AppStream repositories of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5
• .NET 6.0 runtime & SDK UBI container images:
  

• Use the ubi8/dotnet-60-runtime image to run a precompiled application.
• Use the ubi8/dotnet-60 to build applications yourself.
  

In order to build a .NET application for IBM Z, the application has to be ported to .NET 6.0 first. This "porting" often just means to bump up all dependencies on older .NET components to its .NET 6.0 versions. Please see the presentation from Ulrich Weigand below. It uses a common open source package as an example to explain what needs to be done.

References:

• IBM Announcement:
  https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/blogs/elizabeth-k-joseph1/2021/11/10/net-6-comes-to-ibm-z-and-linuxone
• RedHat Announcement:
  https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2021/11/15/net-60-now-available-rhel-and-openshift
• Microsoft Announcement:
  https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-6/
• .NET conference presentation by IBM Distingiushed Engineer, Ulrich Weigand
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMF80uJuv0s

New ELF ABI document for IBM Z and LinuxONE

The "ELF Application Binary Interface s390x Supplement" is an addition to the generic ELF ABI document. It defines the IBM Z and LinuxONE specific calling and linkage conventions and thereby sets the standard for compiler and linker developers to ensure interoperability between different implementations.

In contrast to the older versions hosted by the Linux Foundation, this document is a major overhaul. Apart from many layout and wording improvements it also covers the vector ABI extensions introduced with IBM z13.

You can access the document here:
https://github.com/IBM/s390x-abi/releases/tag/v1.6

New Release: s390-tools v2.19

s390-tools v2.19 is out. This release is in support of Linux kernel 5.15.

The two most notable additions are as follows:

• Support for multi MAC addresses in hsci
  Adds the ability to define a HiperSockets Converged Interface that can register more than a singleMAC address. This allows for usage with Open vSwitch or MacVTap, as typically used in KVM deployments.
  Requires Linux kernel 5.15.
  
• chreipl-fcp-mpath
  The chreipl-fcp-mpath toolset monitors udev events about paths to the re-IPL volume. If the currently configured FCP re-IPL path becomes unavailable, the toolset checks for operational paths to the same volume. If available, it reconfigures the FCP re-IPL settings to use an operational path.
  Thus, re-IPL from an FCP-attached SCSI volume can be successful despite path failures on a running Linux instance if at least one path to the re-IPL volume remains operational.

For further details, see the changelog.

New Release: smc-tools v1.7

smc-tools v1.7 is now available for download here.

Highlights in this release:

• Support for SMC-Rv2
  Similar to SMC-Dv2, SMC-Rv2 lifts the restriction that required peers to be in the same IP subnet.
  
• Support for Enterprise IDs (EID)
  Definition and display of user EIDs as required by SMC-Rv2 is now possible through new command ueid in tools smcd and smcr. Furthermore, smcd now also supports display of the system EID as used implicitly in SMC-Dv2.Dis
  

Requires Linux kernel support staged for 5.16.

For more information, see the README, or the respective man pages for further details on the commands.