Hi Mirek, thanks a lot for that detailed explanation mentioning both the tools and links. That's definitely useful - will include it in our ZSystem wiki as soon as time permits. Kind regards, Holger On Mo, 26 Aug 2024, Miroslav Franc wrote:

Holger Rauch <holger.rauch@posteo.de> writes:

...

Hi Nikolay,

thanks - interesting to know that it's also built for x86_64. (AFAIK, this wasn't the case previously.)

@Sarah: Has s390-tools ever had an x86_64 build? And is there any reason why an x86_64 build for an s390x specific package is needed (at all)? (The only reason I could think of would be tools allowing you to remotely connect to a ZSystems instance *from* an x86_64 system. In case such tools are included in s390-tools, that particular subset of the s390-tools would indeed be useful on x86_64.)

The reasons are the IBM secure execution features[1] related utilites such as managing ultravisor secrets (pvsecret utility), generating secure execution images (genprotimg utility) and managing attestations (pvattest utility) which can be done from x86_64 workstation.[2][3] In theory from any other architecture, but I assume x86_64 is the most important one.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/linuxonibm/pdf/lx24se04.pdf [2] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/linux-on-systems?topic=execution-attesting#t_att... [3] https://video.ibm.com/recorded/132127046

Mirek Franc