Hi everyone, today the new Ubuntu 21.10 (codename: Impish Indri) interim or non-LTS version got released!
It comes - as always - with lots of package updates in general, and on top introduces a huge number of new s390x-specific features, like (just to name a few): - Like with every new Ubuntu release (respectively its kernel) the s390-tools package needs to be upgraded, this time to v2.17 (Bug: 1929024), including zdsfs transparent data set conversion, allowing Linux to transparently read and write EBCDIC-encoded data sets as ASCII (Bug: 1926749), the integration option for the zkey repository into an enterprise key-mangement system with a KMIP interface (Bug: 1932521) and changes in the Secure Execution Header defaults for plaintext control flags, PCF (Bug: 1932177). - In addition to moving to gcc 11.2 as default, further tool-chain updates where made, like updating to LLVM 13 (that derived s390x optimizations from 12 (Bug: 1926709)) and z15 support in Valgrind (Bug: 1853271). - And more predictable interface names for RoCE adapter were introduced, which requires kernel (Bug: 1929185) as well as systemd changes (Bug: 1929184). - Several KVM enhancements specific to s390x were picked up, like performance improvements due to Spinlock Yield Forwarding (Bug: 1905021) and allowing KVM to let SIE interpret specification exceptions (Bug: 1932157), adding support to indicate secure (execution) guests (Bug: 1933173) and improved persistence in vfio-ccw device assignments in libvirt (Bug: 1887929). - Another area of improvements is cryptography. With the upgrade of opencryptoki to 3.16 (Bug: 1928767) cca token import and export of secure key objects is now supported (Bug: 1913301), ep11 token support for attribute bound keys (Bug: 1913303) and ep11 token protected key support (Bug: 1914215) got added. And with the upgrade to libica v3.8.0 (Bug: 1928799) there are now software fallback calls to openSSL/libcrypto (Bug: 1929176). cryptsetup got upgraded too, to v2.3.6 (Bug: 1929046), as well as openssl-ibmca to v2.2.0 (Bug: 1929052), that now makes the ibmca engine call libica without software fall backs (only register ibmca functions if libica confirms it as hardware function) and let ibmca do the fallback (Bug: 1929175). On the kernel level AP bus and zcrypt uevent extensions were added to the zcrypt driver (Bug: 1933496) and CEX8 toleration included (Bug: 1933805). - In addition preparation were included in the kernel (Bug: 1932174) and qemu (Bug: 1932175) for new IBM Z hardware. - The Query Capacity library (qclib) got bumped to it's latest version 2.3.0 (Bug: 1926586), the upgraded glibc v2.34 library comes with several s390x related improvements (Bug: 1927079), similar with the binutils update to v2.37 (Bug: 1927080). On top zlib received CRC32 optimization for s390x (Bug: 1932010) and also PCRE2 got performance and JIT improvements for s390x (Bug: 1931857). And support for SMC statistics was introduced to the kernel (Bug: 1853290) and the smc-tools package updated to it's latest v1.6.0, plus some fixes on top (Bug: 1853301). The full Release announcement (as sent by Łukasz Zemczak on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team) can be found below or here see: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2021-October/000274.html For more details also have a look here: https://ubuntu-on-big-iron.blogspot.com/2021/10/ubuntu-21.10.html Bye, Frank Ubuntu on s390x Blog -- ubuntu-on-big-iron.blogspot.com <http://ubuntu-on-big-iron.blogspot.com/?view=sidebar> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
