Meetings are held on the 2nd Tuesday of the month. Announcements for upcoming meetings with joining information and precise time are sent to the mailing list.
13 May 2025
Attendees:
Elizabeth K. Joseph (IBM)
Sarah Julia Kriesh (openSUSE)
Marcela Maslanova (SUSE)
Andreas Tille (Debian)
Daniel Horak (Fedora)
Stefan Raspl (IBM
Ulrich Weigand (IBM)
Rohan Sen (Developer)
Agenda:
Access to Telum for open source software communities for AI accelerator (AIU) testing. Elizabeth let the team know that she’s made the concern available to hear leadership at IBM, and they’re working toward getting access enabled by the end of the year in the IBM LinuxONE Open Source Software Cloud.
Ulrich reiterated that IBM wants to get projects access however we can, but there are constraints we’re working within.
Sarah reminded the team they’ve been waiting for over a year for this request.
Only IBM can add support right now, and there are projects like libxsmm interested in support that we hope to bring on board when we have the new system at Marist
Ulrich shared that we could find a way to cherry-pick project members for access to resources on specific development issues.
Elizabeth let the team know that IBM has brought on a couple developers for Debian and they’re now doing well with attending to issues that come up, and Andreas confirmed that he has seen their work and offered to help as needed, so has Sarah. Ulrich also shared a bit of history of the s390x version of Debian, and noted the rarity of big endian architectures today.
Sarah brought up this issue for an update: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233167
Ulrich shared that the developer who was working on this is unavailable, but this is a big endian problem and IBM is looking to get it addressed
Elizabeth shared that she’ll be at the Red Hat Summit doing an “IBM LinuxONE AI Arcade” with CLI games installed from various sources on RHEL and an AI/ML Jupyter notebook for attendees to run through an open source fraud prevention scenario
Sarah will be at the IBM Z Symposium 2025 in Stuttgart May 14-15
Sarah spoke at Czech Technical University recently and it went well!
The Open Mainframe Project CFP for IBM TechXchange opened last week, Elizabeth & Sarah will submit a presentation together: https://openmainframeproject.org/blog/community-day-or-bust/
11 March 2025
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Ulrich Weigand (IBM)
Dan Horak (Fedora)
Christian Boltz (openSUSE)
Sarah Kriesch (openSUSE)
Agenda:
Mesa issue: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233167
Ulrich: Better test case required
Everywhere Endian issues can happen with pixels on Big Endian.
Dan: With Rawhide and Xfce it has worked
→ Wayland is the problem?
Sarah: There is the hint in the upstream issue, what has created the issue. There is also a driver change.
Ulrich: Is a smaller Mesa test case available?
Goals for 2025:
z16 based mainframe for all Linux Distributions in Marist College
Thursday, 12th December 2024 Representation of our Linux Distributions Working Group at TAC planned, for annual renewal: https://tac.openmainframeproject.org/meetings/2024-12-12.html
Dan & Ulrich: Keeping the Linux Distributions Working Group is important. The collaboration with issues is the highlight. Add some examples, please.
12 November 2024
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Elizabeth K. Joseph (IBM)
Sarah Julia Kriesch (openSUSE)
Daniel Horak (Fedora)
Ulrich Weigand (IBM)
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Elizabeth K. Joseph (IBM)
Sarah Julia Kriesch (openSUSE)
Daniel Horak (Fedora)
Larry Morris (Canonical)
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Daniel Horak (Fedora)
Sarah Julia Kriesch (openSUSE)
Gayathri Berki (Debian)
Larry Morris (Ubuntu)
Ulrich Weigand (IBM)
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Elizabeth K. Joseph (IBM)
Sarah Julia Kriesch (openSUSE)
Agenda:
Lyz and Sarah scheduled to meet with John Mertic for a regular project check-in on Thursday, June 27th
Lyz participated in a TFiR interview at the Open Source Summit which has now been released: https://tfir.io/linux-distributions-working-group-fosters-collaboration-between-linux-distribution-maintainers/
Via Sarah on the mailing list: Supported Python versions (onnx) https://lists.openmainframeproject.org/g/wg-linux-distros/message/189
Gcc memory issue bug from a couple years ago: Gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=101523 and now: Gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=115028
https://github.com/onnx/onnx/pull/6183 is failing upstream, and in OBS
Andreas is chiming in on the opensuse bug
Containers that the teams at IBM are supporting are detailed here: https://github.com/ibm/zdlc
The public version of the project (onnx-mlir) does create docker images for s390x: https://github.com/onnx/onnx-mlir/tree/main/docker
Lyz asked internally about onnx builds and learned the default version of gcc on SLES that one of the IBM engineers was working on may have been the source of some problems, he told us to zypper to install with gcc12 to install onnx and shared a Dockerfile. Sarah shared that gcc12 is being removed from openSUSE. Also shared that we may also need to pin numpy to !2.0 since it just came out days ago and it hasn’t been tested, but Sarah shared that it’s passing OBS builds.
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Elizabeth (Lyz) K. Joseph (IBM)
Daniel Horak (Fedora)
Ulrich Weigand (IBM)
Sarah Julia Kriesch (openSUSE)
Agenda:
Elizabeth presented at the Open Source Summit specifically about the working group with the angle of establishing niche WGs to help stem feelings of isolation by maintainers. But she noted that most of the Q&A was about open source development on the mainframe - there's an appetite for mainframe in the open source community!
Daniel shared that Fedora 40 is out, but the cloud images aren’t booting for s390x since the switch to kiwi from imagefactory to produce them, but they’re looking into it
Sarah shared that tests for openSUSE Leap for release in the summer are passing and doing well
Sarah went to IBM Z Symposium 2024 got a feature request from a client about running the same binaries on Linux and z/OS, but currently users have to use separate compilers and the IBM proprietary one is the only one that works for z/OS
Ulrich shared that there’s work in upstream LLVM to work as a compiler on z/OS, so in the future it may be possible to use it to cross-compile it for both operating systems, but this is not a supported path. A lot of work is happening in the LLVM code repositories on GitHub for those who are curious.
At the symposium Sarah also spoke to some IBMers about access to an IBM z16, but it’s not available publicly yet. Elizabeth is working on the case internally due to it being a popular request, particularly due to the AI capabilities they wish to leverage.
Sarah shared that she’s going to participate in the upcoming openSUSE conference, no talk on the schedule, but she’ll take advantage of a lightning talk spot if it’s available
Elizabeth met with folks from Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux at the Texas Linux Fest and subsequently the IBM LinuxONE Open Source Software Cloud granted a couple VMs to AlmaLinux and facilitated the migration of Rocky Linux to the KVM environment. Sarah chimed in with some recommendations regarding resources for successful, fast builds on the platform, and Elizabeth took an action item to remind them both about this WG if they run into any challenges.
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Elizabeth (Lyz) K. Joseph (IBM)
Sarah Julia Kriesch (openSUSE)
Daniel Horak (Fedora)
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Elizabeth (Lyz) K. Joseph (IBM)
Gayathri Berli (Debian)
Vignesh (Redpanda upstream)
Marcela Maslanova (SUSE)
David Edelsohn (IBM)
Neil Hanlon (Rocky Linux)
Sarah Julia Kriesch (openSUSE)
Agenda
On Debian librsvg depends on Cairo, Cairo depends on Pixman, so Gayathri has been working on the dependency chain to make sure all the support is in place
Outstanding gtk bug: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1057782 & https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6260 - but do we really need this on s390x?
All good from Rocky Linux and SUSE
Vignesh brought up a dependency chain request via pytorch, which resulted in… https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/99305
VM request was made for Apache Arrow, which Lyz granted yesterday: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/20102
The openSUSE mainframe is back! But still a bit slow, openSUSE release coming up in July so they’re working to get back to full capacity and speed.
Lyz will be presenting at the Southern California Linux Expo in March (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x/presentations/will-your-open-source-project-run-mainframe-and-beyond) which will include mention of the WG, and has a few other talks coming up in April
Sarah will be presenting at Grazer Linuxtage 2024 in early April (in German): https://pretalx.linuxtage.at/glt24/talk/KYDAVN/
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Elizabeth K. Joseph (IBM)
Sarah Julia Kriesch (openSUSE)
Daniel Horak (Fedora)
Marcela Maslanova (SUSE)
David Edelsohn (IBM)
Ulrich Weigand (IBM)
Gayathri Berki (Debian)
...
AlmaLinux 9 beta came out with s390x support: https://almalinux.org/blog/almalinux-9-beta-now-available/
Fedora 36 release is on 10 May
openSUSE conference coming up in Nürnberg, Germany and Sarah is giving her Collaboration instead of Competition talk: https://events.opensuse.org/conferences/oSC22/program/proposals/3700
Sarah launched a discussion about additional hardware possibilities, beyond what RHEL, SUSE, and Ubuntu have proposed and are collaborating with IBM on, community input from what the distros are seeing
If the hardware has $x feature, it may be interesting to see $y business cases realized
Do new HMCs have optical drives for DVD-based installs? Interesting question for installation / maintenance from the distros.
Remote desktop xrdp client isn’t building on openSUSE: https://build.opensuse.org/package/live_build_log/openSUSE:Factory:zSystems/xrdp/standard/s390x (the server is fine, which is the more common use case)
Ulrich checked - upstream claims to support it, a patch went in in March 2021
FYI Fedora patch: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/xrdp/blob/rawhide/f/xrdp-0.9.16-arch.patch
Open Mainframe Project CFP: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-mainframe-summit/program/cfp/
Sarah and Lyz will work together on a proposal about the WG and progress being made, due June 10
If accepted, Lyz will present in person in Philadelphia
Other upcoming events
June 2-4: openSUSE conference (Sarah is speaking, see above)
June 16-18: VM Workshop is in June (CFP already closed)
August 21-26: SHARE in August (CFP already closed)
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