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Ubuntu 21.10 released for IBM Z and LinuxONE

  

This week the latest Ubuntu release came out, Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri". As with all releases since 2016, IBM Z is one of the supported architectures. General release notes for Ubuntu 21.10 are available: Impish Indri Release Notes


But as Frank Heimes details in his post on the Ubuntu on Big Iron blog: Impish Indri is out - another primate escaped! aka Ubuntu 21.10 got released!, there are many IBM Z (s390x) specific changes of note, including the following (paraphrased from his blog post):

  • Upgrade of the s390-tools package to version 2.17, which includes: zdsfs transparent data set conversion, allowing Linux to transparently read and write EBCDIC-encoded data sets as ASCII, the integration option for the zkey repository into an enterprise key-management system with a KMIP interface and changes in the Secure Execution Header defaults for plaintext control flags, PCF.
  • Moving to gcc 11.2 as default and further tool-chain updates where made, including updating to LLVM 13 and z15 support in Valgrind.
  • More predictable interface names for RoCE adapter were introduced (which requires kernel as well as systemd changes).
  • Several KVM enhancements.
  • Upgrade of opencryptoki to 3.16, libica to v3.8.0, and several more packages of interest related to cryptography.

And much more!

Be sure to read the full blog post for details about support, upgrade path, and links to downloads and other resources.