A new strategic collaboration for IBM, and this time it’s with Arm.
The current focus is the virtualization of Arm software on mainframes. Big Blue doesn’t miss the reference to the modern workloads, “AI and data-intensive workloads…” It looks further ahead, envisioning “shared technological layers” between the two ecosystems.
Just hours before this announcement, its teams added a patchset to the Linux kernel. It enables Arm64 virtualization on s390 by introducing a common KVM layer.
For now, the SAE (Start Arm Execution) instruction is introduced as the mechanism to run guests. Future patches will add, “in the coming months,” support for system registers, interrupts, the PMU, and more.
Bringing the reliability guarantees of mainframes to this ecosystem — while bringing applications closer to the data — could deter customers from turning to Arm-specific servers. Especially in the current economic environment for electronic components.
On the x86 front, IBM already has in its portfolio the PowerVM Lx86 emulation layer. This binary translator allows Linux applications to run on a range of servers, including the System p family.
Further reading:
Claude Code, the end of mainframes? IBM cries foul at conflation
In public cloud, the cost-performance ratio stalls
AWS joins Azure and Google Cloud on nested virtualization
From the Fluidstack hiccup to debt relief, Mistral AI faces infrastructure uncertainties
