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Fedora s390x

Targets

short term goals

  • prepare and release F-20 for System z

long term goals

  • reach out to known interested parties in community
  • have several "interested parties" that will help with development and testing once we are building packages/trees
  • reaching out (through contacts) to IBM community (.de)
  • provide development trees for testing
  • release next Fedora versions shortly after the primary archs

Accomplished

People

History

FUDcon 2008 was an excellent event. During the conference, a session on secondary arches was presented and there was an excellent effort made to reach out to new arches.

After several months of bootstrapping as of June 2009 we've reached a state where we have most packages built from current Fedora rawhide CVS. There are still around ~500 failures, most of which are related to java and ocaml dependencies (ocaml is not available on s390x).

News of September 2010: We're now getting really close to Rawhide and we have a working install tree available thats basically based on current Fedora 14. Previously we only provided a hercules images as well as a tarball from a root FS as installs weren't possible. We still provide those, but now you can do your own installs again, too!

For those interested in trying it out you access everything needed from here:

http://secondary.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/spins/S390/

You will find several files there:

  • README
    • Very brief howto get everything up and running, either for running preinstalled hercules images or how to do a complete install yourself
  • fedora-14-s390x.img
    • Hercules Fedora 14 s390x compressed DASD image..
  • anaconda-ks.cfg
    • Sample kickstart file that installs a very basic system on a dasd image. WARNING! Wipes out the whole partition table, so use with care
  • hercules.cnf
    • hercules emulator config file
  • hercules.init
    • Small script to start up hercules with some iptables rules for NAT (might require you to modify your personal rules in order to work properly)
  • generic.prm
    • Kernel command line parameter file, needed for installation
  • older files
    • fedora-14-s390x.img.bz2
      • Hercules Fedora 14 s390x DASD image, bz2 compressed. Needs to be unpacked before it can be used. Beware that the uncompressed size is ~8Gb !
    • f11-s390x.img
      • Hercules Fedora 11 s390x DASD image
    • f11-s390x.tar.bz2
      • tarball of the whole tree. Can be unpacked on a real machine (confirmed it works!)

Supported hardware

Releases Notes

Tips

Known runtime issues

  • After installation the yum repo doesn't point at our mash tree. Simply do the following to fix that:
echo '[fedora]
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=http://s390.koji.fedoraproject.org/mash/rawhide/s390x/os/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0' > /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
  • If you've selected to do a minimal installation your system will boot up with no network enabled.

This happens because Networkmanager isn't included in a minimal install. To fix this, log on as root on the console and run 

chkconfig network on
service network start

Known build issues

Notes for application developers and package maintainers

  • some hardware that's usual on other platforms is missing, like
    • USB - starting F-15 we have libusb1/libusb built to resolve some dependency issues, but it's a no-op, still no real USB on the mainframe :-)
    • FireWire
    • InfiniBand
  • memory ordering is big-endian and wrong typecasting between pointers to integers of different size can cause fatal errors
  • char is unsigned by default, some FAQ
  • size_t is alias for unsigned long on s390, so the assumption size_t == unsigned int fails here, seen in C++ code using templates
  • s390 (31-bit) arch has 2 GB address space and it can be too small when building large C++ applications with debug information enabled, such builds can fail in the final link with errors like "Final link failed: exhausted memory" => the workaround is to disable debug information (remove -g from CXXFLAGS)
  • Mono 2.8+ drops support for s390 (31-bit)
  • valgrind is available on s390x since F-15
  • stack larger than the default 8 MB is required to build pcre 8.11 (a test crashes with SIGSEGV, but no apparent reason)
  • some programming languages are missing, like Objective Caml (ocaml), Haskell (ghc), ...
  • xmlto needs w3m to fullfil the dependency on text-www-browser instead of lynx, otherwise it fails on empty file (seen in libXest, libSM, libXtst)
  • sometimes wrong package is selected to fulfill a BuildRequires when multiple packages provide the name
  • the qmake tool (part of QT) thinks s390x and ppc64 are of "linux-g++-64" type while x86_64 is "linux-g++" type

Please make sure to build into the correct target, don't mix dist-f41 and dist-f41-updates

To test a build for your specific package for s390x do this:

After running fedora-packager-setup from the fedora-packager rpm 

* s390-koji build --scratch dist-f41 yourpkg.src.rpm

To build a package which should end up in the F-41 tree, the package needs to be commited in dist-git and then be built with: 

* s390-koji build dist-f41 "$(fedpkg giturl)"

Tracker Bugs

If excluding s390/s390x architectures you need to make the bug block F-ExcludeArch-s390x

to see whats currently blocking visit Bugzilla

If a bug is specific to s390/s390x architectures make the bug blocking ZedoraTracker

to see not yet resolved issues visit Bugzilla

Packages under review

List of s390 specific packages currently under review in Fedora

none

Packages to be submitted:

  • zfcphbaapi - now a subpackage of s390utils, but own package will serve better
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