Linux is ubiquitous! That means it runs on everything from phones we carry with us everywhere, to large mainframe systems that sit in our data centers and still drive the core of banking, airlines, and more. In this talk, I’ll provide a quick history of the 20+ years Linux has been running on mainframes to provide context. From there I’ll dig into the core of the talk with technical details of how Linux is installed on the platform, and the interesting hardware-driven features available to Linux via standard open source tools, from default on-chip compression and decompression via gzip, to support on each core for OpenSSL-driven cryptography. Plus, the latest processor has on-chip AI/ML hardware features that have a fully open source inferencing pipeline on Linux.

To conclude, I’ll share resources from the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project that have allowed the Linux distributions to collaborate, and a series of free tools and services provided by various organizations so open source developers can easily port their own applications to the mainframe architecture.