October 15, 2014

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 released

It's been an unusual long time between releases - but now nearly eleven months after the last release Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 6.6. The kernel level is now kernel-2.6.32-504.el6, for the main bug fixes see the kernel update description.

As usual there are the release notes and the technical notes in two separate documents. The complete documentation can be reached from the Red Hat documentation page.

For System z this has been a mainly a fix release. Only a few small enhancements have been added all described in the technical notes. Here are some of them:
  • libhugetlbfs support for System z
  • crypto updates: libica, opencryptoki
  • read only sequential data set access avoiding ftp/nfs transfers from z/OS using the zdfs file system
The IBM documentation for RHEL 6.4 on developerworks still applies for this release.

October 14, 2014

New article: Using Linux on System z Hardware Cryptography with the PKCS#11 Cryoptography Stack

As a follow on to the Java crypto article there is a new one covering PKCS#11 and the System z hardware stack published in the EnterpriseTech Journal.
It explains what PKCS#11 is and how the API works and what methods are supported. Then it covers OpenCryptoki the open source implementation of PKCS#11 and how it's configured and used. This article is for everyone who is seeking better understanding of the exploitation of the hardware crypto facilities from Linux on System z.

October 7, 2014

IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) available for Linux on System z

IBM has announced the availability of the General Parallel File System (GPFS) aka Elastic Storage for Linux on System z. It's the new 4.1 version and for zLinux the minimum distribution requirements are
  • RHEL 6.5 + latest z stream patches
  • RHEL 7.0
  • SLES 11 SP3 + latest maintenance patches 
 There is also a short Redbook solution guide available.