Hi Miro, Thank you for this detailed explanation!

Gesendet: Montag, 26. August 2024 um 13:51 Uhr Von: "Miroslav Franc" <mfranc@suse.cz> An: "Holger Rauch" <holger.rauch@posteo.de> Cc: "Nikolay GUEORGUIEV" <nikolay.gueorguiev@suse.com>, "Raphael Groner" <projects.rg@smart.ms>, zsystems@lists.opensuse.org, ada.lovelace@gmx.de Betreff: Re: More Recent Version For s390-tools (2.31 => 2.34) on Tumbleweed

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.

I didn't know about these features for x86_64. Then I gave the trainings for s390-tools based on an old feature set. I will add these links to our openSUSE zSystems wiki for future trainings and if anybody requires that.

[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

Best regards, Sarah

Mirek Franc