Integrated Facility For Linux
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Integrated Facility For Linux
The Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) is an IBM mainframe and Power Systems processor dedicated to running the Linux operating system. On IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE machines, IFLs can be used with or without hypervisors such as z/VM and KVM. IFLs are one of three most common types of "specialty" IBM mainframe processors that give software vendors (and their customers) more granular control over software licensing and maintenance costs. (The other most common specialty processors are and ICFs). Microcode restricts IFLs to Linux workload by omitting some processor instructions not used by the Linux kernel (that other operating systems use), but the underlying processors are physically identical to general purpose processors (CPs). When IBM adds features and performance improvements to its mainframes' general purpose main processors (which can also run Linux), those features and improvements nearly always apply equally to IFLs. In fact, in recent IBM Z machines IFLs support simultane ...
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IBM Mainframe
IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the large computer market. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of the IBM System/360. First and second generation From 1952 into the late 1960s, IBM manufactured and marketed several large computer models, known as the IBM 700/7000 series. The first-generation 700s were based on vacuum tubes, while the later, second-generation 7000s used transistors. These machines established IBM's dominance in electronic data processing ("EDP"). IBM had two model categories: one (701, 704, 709, 7030, 7090, 7094, 7040, 7044) for engineering and scientific use, and one (702, 705, 705-II, 705-III, 7080, 7070, 7072, 7074, 7010) for commercial or data processing use. The two categories, scientific and commercial, generally used common peripherals but had completely different instruction sets, and there were incompatibiliti ...
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Microcode
In processor design, microcode (μcode) is a technique that interposes a layer of computer organization between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. Microcode is a layer of hardware-level instructions that implement higher-level machine code instructions or internal finite-state machine sequencing in many digital processing elements. Microcode is used in general-purpose central processing units, although in current desktop CPUs, it is only a fallback path for cases that the faster hardwired control unit cannot handle. Microcode typically resides in special high-speed memory and translates machine instructions, state machine data, or other input into sequences of detailed circuit-level operations. It separates the machine instructions from the underlying electronics so that instructions can be designed and altered more freely. It also facilitates the building of complex multi-step instructions, while red ...
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Linux On IBM Z
Linux on IBM Z or Linux on zSystems is the collective term for the Linux operating system compiled to run on IBM mainframes, especially IBM Z / IBM zSystems and IBM LinuxONE servers. Similar terms which imply the same meaning are ''Linux/390'', ''Linux/390x,'' etc. The three Linux distributions certified for usage on the IBM Z hardware platform are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu. History Linux on IBM Z originated as two separate efforts to port Linux to IBM's System/390 servers. The first effort, the "Bigfoot" project, developed by Linas Vepstas in late 1998 through early 1999, was an independent distribution and has since been abandoned. IBM published a collection of patches and additions to the Linux 2.2.13 kernel on December 18, 1999, to start today's mainline Linux on IBM Z. Formal product announcements quickly followed in 2000, including the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) engines. Think Blue Linux was an early mainframe distribution ...
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Hitachi, Ltd
() is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group (''Hitachi Gurūpu'') and had formed part of the Nissan Group, Nissan ''zaibatsu'' and later DKB Group and Fuyo Group of companies before DKB and Fuji Bank (the core Fuyo Group company) merged into the Mizuho Financial Group. As of 2020, Hitachi conducts business ranging from Information technology, IT, including Artificial intelligence, AI, the Internet of things, Internet of Things, and big data, to infrastructure. Hitachi is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Nagoya Stock Exchange and its Tokyo listing is a constituent of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX Core30 indices. It is ranked 38th in the 2012 Fortune Global 500 and 129th in the 2012 Forbes Global 2000. History Hitachi was founded in 1910 by electrical engineer Namihei Odaira (1874–1951) in Ibaraki Prefecture. The company's firs ...
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Fujitsu
is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the largest in Japan, in 2021. The hardware offerings from Fujitsu are mainly of personal and enterprise computing products, including x86, SPARC and mainframe compatible server products, although the corporation and its subsidiaries also offer a diversity of products and services in the areas of data storage, telecommunications, advanced microelectronics, and air conditioning. It has approximately 126,400 employees and its products and services are available in approximately 180 countries. Fujitsu is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Nagoya Stock Exchange; its Tokyo listing is a constituent of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX 100 indices. History 1935 to 2000 Fujitsu was established on June 20, 1935, which makes it one of the oldest operating ...
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OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the eponymous operating system software. OpenSolaris is a descendant of the UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) code base developed by Sun and AT&T in the late 1980s and is the only version of the System V variant of UNIX available as open source. OpenSolaris was developed as a combination of several software ''consolidations'' that were open sourced starting with Solaris 10. It includes a variety of free software, including popular desktop and server software. After Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle discontinued development of OpenSolaris in house, pivoting to focus exclusively on the development of the proprietary Solaris Express (now Oracle Solaris). Prior to Oracle's close-sourcing Solaris, a group of former O ...
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Z/VSE
VSEn (''Virtual Storage Extended'') is an operating system for IBM mainframe computers, the latest one in the DOS/360 lineage, which originated in 1965. DOS/VSE was introduced in 1979 as a successor to DOS/VS; in turn, DOS/VSE was succeeded by VSE/SP version 1 in 1983, and VSE/SP version 2 in 1985. In February 2005, IBM announced z/VSE as successor to VSE/ESA 2.7, which was named to reflect the new System z branding for IBM's mainframe product line. In June 2021, 21st Century Software Inc announced that it had licensed the z/VSE source code from IBM with the intention of developing new versions of the operating system. As part of this transfer, z/VSE was renamed to VSEn. It is less common than z/OS and is mostly used on smaller machines. In the late 1980s, there was a widespread perception among VSE customers that IBM was planning to discontinue VSE and migrate its customers to MVS instead, although IBM relented and agreed to continue to produce new versions of VSE. Overview DO ...
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IBM ESA/390
IBM Enterprise Systems Architecture is an instruction set architecture introduced by IBM as ESA/370 in 1988. It is based on the IBM System/370-XA architecture. It extended the dual-address-space mechanism introduced in later IBM System/370 models by adding a new mode in which general-purpose registers 1-15 are each associated with an access register referring to an address space, with instruction operands whose address is computed with a given general-purpose register as a base register will be in the address space referred to by the corresponding address register. The later ESA/390, introduced in 1990, added a facility to allow device descriptions to be read using channel commands and, in later models, added instructions to perform IEEE 754 floating-point operations and increased the number of floating-point registers from 4 to 16. Enterprise Systems Architecture is essentially a 32-bit architecture; as with System/360, System/370, and 370-XA, the general-purpose registers a ...
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Simultaneous Multithreading
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a technique for improving the overall efficiency of superscalar CPUs with hardware multithreading. SMT permits multiple independent threads of execution to better use the resources provided by modern processor architectures. Details The term ''multithreading'' is ambiguous, because not only can multiple threads be executed simultaneously on one CPU core, but also multiple tasks (with different page tables, different task state segments, different protection rings, different I/O permissions, etc.). Although running on the same core, they are completely separated from each other. Multithreading is similar in concept to preemptive multitasking but is implemented at the thread level of execution in modern superscalar processors. Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is one of the two main implementations of multithreading, the other form being temporal multithreading (also known as super-threading). In temporal multithreading, only one thread of ...
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Coupling Facility
In IBM System/390 and IBM Z mainframe computers, a Coupling Facility or CF is a piece of computer hardware or virtual machine that coordinates multiple processors. A Parallel Sysplex relies on one or more Coupling Facilities (CFs). A coupling facility is a mainframe processor (runs in an own LPAR, with dedicated physical CP, defined through Hardware Management Console (HMC)), with memory and special channels (CF Links), and a specialized operating system called Coupling Facility Control Code (CFCC). It has no I/O devices, other than the CF links. The information in the CF resides entirely in memory as CFCC is not a virtual memory operating system. A CF typically has a large memory – of the order of several tens of gigabytes. The CF runs no application software. When originally introduced, the CFCC executed in a separate 9674 mainframe unit that was essentially a processor without I/O facilities other than the CF links. Later IBM enabled the use of an Internal Coupling Facili ...
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IBM Power Systems
Power Systems is a family of server computers from IBM that are based on its Power processors. It was created in 2008 as a merger of the System p and System i product lines. History IBM had two distinct POWER- and PowerPC-based hardware lines since the early 1990s: * Servers running processors based on the IBM PowerPC-AS architecture in the AS/400 family (later known as iSeries, then System i) running OS/400 (later known as i5/OS, and now IBM i) * Servers and workstations using POWER and PowerPC processors in the RS/6000 family (later known as pSeries, then System p), running IBM AIX and Linux on Power. After the introduction of the POWER4 processor in 2001, there was little difference between both the "p" and the "i" hardware; the only differences were in the software and services offerings. With the introduction of the POWER5 processor in 2004, even the product numbering was synchronized. The ''System i5 570'' was virtually identical to the ''System p5 570''. In Apr ...
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ZIIP
In IBM System z9 and successor mainframes, the System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) is a special purpose processor. It was initially introduced to relieve the general mainframe central processors (CPs) of specific Db2 processing loads, but currently is used to offload other z/OS workloads as described below. The idea originated with previous special purpose processors, the zAAP, which offloads Java processing, and the IFL, which runs Linux and z/VM but not other IBM operating systems such as z/OS, DOS/VSE and TPF. A System z PU (processor unit) is "characterized" as one of these processor types, or as a CP (Central Processor), or SAP (System Assist Processor). These processors do not contain microcode or hardware features that accelerate their designated workloads. Instead, by relieving the general CP of particular workloads, they often lead to a higher workload throughput at reduced license fees. DB2 for z/OS V8 was the first application to exploit the zIIP, but no ...
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