Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2020

Curious about how VM (Virtual Machine) technology that got its start in the 1970s allowed Linux to be run on the mainframe by a group of hobbyists in the late 1990s?

Starting in the 1970s and then covering the past 20 years, this talk will begin with the hobbyist and independent roots of virtualization and Linux on the mainframe. It will speak to specific moments in the timeline that exemplify the progress made by various Linux distributions and open source software projects to port software to Linux on the mainframe since the first Linux patches were released in 1999.

Today there is an entire product line of mainframes that exclusively run Linux (RHEL, SLES, or Ubuntu). With Linux, you get access to the vast ecosystem of open source software that’s already been ported to the mainframe architecture (s390x), with more being ported every month.

Finally, we take a look at the Open Mainframe Project, which has a series of open source projects targeted specifically at more traditional mainframe workloads and improving usability. Zowe, for instance, helps create a consolidated API for accessing resources and workload on your system and Feilong is a z/VM connector that allows you to manage your virtual machines with familiar open source tooling like OpenStack. There are even connectors for Jenkins that allow you to integrate CI/CD pipelines with your workloads.