Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE use the s390x hardware architecture to run various Linux distributions, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Ubuntu. Tens of thousands of software packages are tested and distributed through these projects, and various community distributions.
But for some applications, a team at IBM pays special attention to make sure they compile and run as expected (or better!). This work is often done as a collaboration between the open source projects themselves and the team at IBM. This effort is an on-going collaboration with every release of the software needing to be validated.
Welcome to our monthly report!
For the month of September 2025, the team worked to also validate recent versions of the following:
- Alfresco
- Apache Kafka
- Apache Storm
- Apache ZooKeeper
- Bazel
- Beats
- Elasticsearch
- Erlang
- Fluentd
- HAProxy
- InfluxDB
- Libunwind
- Logstash
- MongoDB Driver - CXX
- MongoDB Driver - Java
- MySQL8.x
- MySQL 9.x
- Netty-tcnative
- noble-hashes
- OPA
- pgvector
- PHP
- PM2
- PostgreSQL
- Python
- RabbitMQ
- Rails
- Ruby
- Salt
- Terraform
- Zabbix Agent
- Zabbix Server
The full list of validated software to date is available here: https://www.ibm.com/community/z/open-source-software/
September was the third month we had our GitHub Actions service up and running, and we were thrilled to on-board ggml-org/llama.cpp so they could bring s390x into CI and start releasing containers. We also worked with the systemd community to solve some container limitations in our initial launch so we could be added to their CI system. Our work with the Ruby community continued by bringing in both Ruby OpenSSL and Ruby Fiddle.
Beyond GitHub Actions enablements, the NAPI-RS is seeking to expand support for enterprise by adding builds for architectures like IBM Z, and recently added s390x to their CI and have updated their crossbuild README accordingly. The s390x binaries were also added to the Buf README as binaries began being produced with v1.56.0. We saw CI added in Rust futures-rs and simd-everywhere (everywhere, indeed!). Finally, the RamaLama has begun building containers for s390x and ppc64le.
Looking for open source software that's not maintained by this team? Visit the Open Mainframe Project Software Discovery Tool to search for what you're looking for across a number Linux distributions. And there are always folks from IBM and beyond working to enable more projects that we don't even know about!
Are you a developer for an open source project interested in seeing your application made available to users on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE? Your first stop should be the IBM LinuxONE Community Cloud where you can sign up for a free virtual machine for 120 days where you can see how your application runs, and discover for yourself what you may need to change to get it to run well on Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE.
If you wish to have permanent virtual machines for development, testing, or to add to your CI system, you can fill out this form to apply for resources for your project.