IBM System z supports a handful of operating systems; z/VM, z/VSE, z/OS, z/TPF, and finally zLinux. All the earlier mentioned OSes are proprietary except for zLinux which is simply Linux with a fancy z in the name. zLinux is the term used to describe a Linux distribution compiled for S390 (31 bit) or S390X (64 bit). As we are talking about modern mainframes I will not be discussing S390, only S390X. There is a comfortable amount of distributions that support S390X - more or less all of the popular distributions do. In this list we find distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, and RHEL. Noticeably Arch is missing but then again they only have an official port for x86-64. This is great - this means that we could download the latest Ubuntu, boot the DVD, and be up and running in no time, right? Well, sadly no. The devil is, as always, in the details. When compiling high level code like C/C++/Go the compiler needs to select an instruction set to use for the compi...
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