Open-source News

Authors: John Mertic, Maemalynn Meanor, Jason Perlow

The mainframe is a foundational technology that has powered industries for decades, including government, financial, healthcare, and transportation. With the help of surrounding communities, the technologies built around this platform have paved the way for the emergence of a new set of technologies we see deployed today. Notably, a significant number of mainframe technologies are profoundly embracing open source.

Linux comes to the mainframe

As Linux began to take the world by storm in the 1990s, a small group of mainframe enthusiasts started experimenting with Linux on IBM System 390 (a previously current generation of mainframe hardware). Over the last 20 years, others like Hitachi and Fujitsu also invested in enabling open source and Linux on their mainframe platforms. Linux on mainframe marked its official start on December 18, 1999, with IBM publishing a collection of patches and additions to the Linux 2.2.13 kernel. 

The year 2000 brought momentum to Linux on the mainframe. The first true “Linux distribution” for these systems came in early 2000 as a collaboration between Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Think Blue Linux by Millenux in Germany. By October of that year, SUSE became the first vendor-supported Linux Distribution, in the first release of what’s now known as SUSE Enterprise Linux. SUSE’s first s390x distro represented an early example of the mainframe leading the way in the evolution of computing technology.

Today, nine known Linux distributions currently provide an s390x architecture variant: Alpine, ClefOS, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, RHEL, SUSE, and Ubuntu.

The expansion of the mainframe as a platform for Linux continues to be nurtured in the Open Mainframe Project, with key projects outlined below helping Linux on the mainframe continue to be a platform used by Fortune 100 companies worldwide.

• Feilong, which provides an interface between z/VM (the primary hypervisor for mainframe, is directly based on technology and concepts dating back to the 1960s) and modern cloud stack systems such as OpenStack, is jointly developed by IBM, SUSE, and others.
• Tessia is a tool that automates and simplifies the installation, configuration, and testing of Linux systems running on the Z platform.

Developments in COBOL 

COBOL, which stands for “Common Business-Oriented Language,” is a compiled, English-like computer programming language developed for use as a business applications language. Its roots go back to the 1950s, and COBOL is still frequently used in many industries for key applications.

The COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020 put high levels of stress on various government services due to the unprecedented number of unemployment applications and other similar needs. This put the spotlight on COBOL, as it was then the predominant technology used for these systems. This also highlighted the perceived lack of talent to support these systems, which have code going back to the 1960s. 

The vast COBOL and mainframe communities quickly addressed this need and made several efforts to provide a sustainable home for COBOL.

• Calling all COBOL Programmers Forum – an Open Mainframe Project forum where developers and programmers who would like to volunteer can post their profiles or are available for hire. Whether they are actively looking for employment, retired skilled veterans looking to stay involved, students who have completed COBOL courses, or are professionals wanting to volunteer, the forum offers the opportunity for job seekers to specify their level of expertise and availability to assist. Employers can then connect with these individuals as needed. 

• COBOL Technical Forum – a new forum created specifically to address COBOL technical questions in which experienced COBOL programmers monitor activity. The forum allows all programmers to quickly learn new techniques and draw from a broad range of community expertise to address common questions and challenges exacerbated during this unprecedented time. 
• Open Source COBOL Training – the Open Mainframe Project Technical Advisory Council has approved hosting a new open source project that will lead collaborative efforts to create training materials on COBOL. The courseware was contributed by IBM based on its work with clients and institutions for higher education and is provided under an open source license. 

These initiatives were followed by a formal COBOL Working Group established later in 2020 to address the long-term challenges in building a sustainable COBOL ecosystem. 

In early 2021, attention turned to the tooling ecosystem for COBOL developers with the launch of the COBOL Check project. This initiative enables test-driven development (TDD) practices for COBOL by providing a unit testing framework.

Zowe brings together the industry leaders to drive the future development paradigms of the mainframe

Traditionally, organizations have been challenged by integrating mainframe applications and data with the other systems that power their enterprise. This integration task further created a talent development challenge, as the paradigms between mainframe and other enterprise computing systems differed enough to make skills not easily transferable.

Broadcom, IBM, and Rocket Software saw this challenge and independently developed various frameworks to close this gap with the mainframe development experience. These include:

• An API Mediation Layer for standardizing the API experience for mainframe applications and services
• A CLI tool that could be run on a developer’s laptop or other non-mainframe systems and used for DevOps tooling integration.
• A Web Desktop interface to make it easier to develop web-based applications that leverage mainframe services and data using common development toolkits.

These components came together in August 2018 in Zowe, which was the first open source project launched that targeted the z/OS operating system (the predominant operating system on mainframe systems). The intention of bringing this project into the vendor-neutral Open Mainframe Project was to establish Zowe as the dominant development and integration tool for mainframe systems, aligning the mainframe community around Zowe.

After Zowe 1.0 was released in February 2019, the project quickly turned to enable a downstream ecosystem of vendor offerings to flourish by establishing the Zowe Conformance Program in August 2019. To date, there are more than 50 Zowe Conformant offerings from 6 different vendors in the mainframe industry.

In addition, Zowe has brought new projects into its scope, with the following incubator projects as of August 2021:

• ZEBRA, which provides re-usable and industry compliant JSON formatted RMF/SMF data records so that many other ISV SW and users can exploit them using open-source SW in many ways (contributed by Vicom Infinity).
• Workflow WiZard helps developers and systems programmers simplify the generation and management of z/OSMF workflows (contributed by BMC).

Zowe boasts more than 300 contributors with more than 34,000 contributions as of August 2021.

Mentorship to support the mainframes of tomorrow

Open Mainframe Project has experienced record growth in contributions this year, with more than 105.31 Million Lines of Code written and over 9,600 commits submitted by Open Mainframe Project communities to date— a 100 percent increase across 20 projects and working groups. These numbers will only increase as Open Mainframe continues to be the cornerstone of governance and innovation for modernizing the mainframe and its path to IoT, Cloud, and Edge Computing.

But the mainframe workforce is aging — in fact, many organizations employ mainframers who half or more of their staff will be eligible for retirement soon. The aging workforce will be a global issue as many schools have shifted from teaching mainframe skills and important languages like COBOL and assembler. Some students don’t even know what a mainframe is or aren’t aware they use one each day. 

The mainframe isn’t going away, so that means we need to get younger mainframers on board.

That’s why the Linux Foundation chose to help close the skills gap through education and training. Through the Open Mainframe Project’s Mentorship program, the project offered a hands-on experience in an open source environment with leaders from member companies such as BMC/Compuware, Broadcom, IBM, Micro Focus, Rocket Software, and many others.

This year, the mentorship program welcomed its largest mentee class from around the globe that worked on popular projects such as ATOM, COBOL Programming Course, COBOL Working Group, Mainframe Open Education, Polycephaly, Software Discovery Tool, and Zowe. Through one-on-one conversations, collaborative community meetings, technical development, and accessibility to mainframe technology, Open Mainframe helped lay the groundwork for the next generation of mainframers. 

Additionally, as COBOL continues to be on-demand this year, Open Mainframe continued to enhance resources: 

• The COBOL Programming Course, which also became the first Open Mainframe project to complete the lifecycle and graduate to become a mature active project, went through an extensive overhaul to provide more detailed content for a better experience and deeper understanding for students and developers looking for a refresher course.
• COBOL Check launched in March to improve the design, understandability, maintainability, and longevity of core business applications. It supports IBM’s mainframe modernization program by enabling restructuring of existing applications of APIs. COBOL Check will complement the COBOL Programming Course and will leverage the support of the COBOL Working Group.

The future is bright for the mainframe

The mainframe has seen a resurgence in the past five years, with the launch of the Open Mainframe Project and the industry coming together in key open source projects in the COBOL, Linux on System Z, and z/OS ecosystems. The Open Mainframe Project hosts more than 20 projects and working groups supported by over 45 organizations as of August 2021, with no signs of slowing anytime soon.

Open Mainframe Summit 2021

For the second consecutive year, Open Mainframe Project hosted its flagship event virtually on September 22-23.

The theme of this year’s Open Mainframe Summit expanded beyond the mainframe to highlight influencers with strengths in the areas supporting or leveraging the technology like continuous delivery, edge computing, financial services, and open source. Keynote speakers for the event included Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS); Jason Shepherd, Vice President of Ecosystem at ZEDEDA and Chair of the LF Edge Governing Board; Jono Bacon, a leading community and collaboration speaker and founder of Jono Bacon Consulting; Steve Winslow, Vice President of Compliance and Legal at The Linux Foundation; Tracy Ragan, CEO and Co-Founder of DeployHub and Continuous Delivery Foundation Board Member, and more.

The event also highlighted projects, diversity, and business topics that offered seasoned professionals, developers, students, and leaders an opportunity to share best practices and network with like-minded individuals.

Open Mainframe Summit ended with 219 registered attendees that represented 83 companies. During the conference, there were 167 unique users on the platform, a 77% attendance rate, which is a slight increase when compared to last year.

The conference videos are available on the Open Mainframe Project Youtube Channel. Click here for the complete playlist.

These efforts are made possible by the dozens of enterprises that support the Open Mainframe Project. To learn how your organization can get involved, click here

The post In Case You Missed It: State of the Open Mainframe 2021 appeared first on Linux Foundation.

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Author: Chris Friedt, Sofware Release Manager, Zephyr Project

Here we are – 2 ½ years since the release of Zephyr Long Term Support (LTS) V1.

In what seems like the blink of an eye, Linux has turned 30 and has gone where no penguin has gone before. Some may forget that the Zephyr Real-Time Operating System went to space, too (albeit under a different name).

Meanwhile, here on Earth, the Zephyr Project received 26,845 commits, 1,764,230 lines of code added, and published ten tagged releases since the LTS V1.

Our contributing community continues to grow – 500 to 1384. If you haven’t met our Embla Flatlandsmo, our 1000th contributor, you can do so here. Numerous Zephyr-based products have been launched (one day, I would like to know just how many). Companies have been formed around Zephyr, and many of them contribute back to the Zephyr Project on GitHub.

Zephyr is now a common theme at technical conferences:

• Of course, the very first Zephyr Developer Summit was held this year
• Open Source Summit featured several Zephyr-related talks
• At Linux Plumbers Conference, Zephyr was a consistent theme in both the IoT Micro-conference as well as the Refereed Track
• At the Embedded Linux Conference, we had a live demonstration of the Zephyr RTOS, broadcast across the globe, going from 0 to “Hello, world!” in 1 minute!

Let’s take a quick look at some of the changes that have enabled Zephyr’s success.

What’s New in LTS V2

In September, when we said that this is the biggest release of Zephyr ever, we weren’t kidding! Below are some of the highlights extracted from the complete v2.7.0 ChangeLog.

• Zephyr SDK users should adopt the new Zephyr 0.13.1 SDK release
• The new SDK includes
  • initial support for building Zephyr on macOS
  • updated Qemu version to 6.0.0
  • updated to GCC 10.3
  • updated to support ARC64
  • improved C++ support
  • switched to using newlib-nano
  • updated to Yocto 3.2.3 baseline
  • updated OpenOCD snapshot

Major enhancements with this release include

• Bluetooth Audio, Direction Finding, and Mesh improvements
• Support for Bluetooth Advertisement PDU Chaining
• Added support for armclang / armlinker toolchain via toolchain abstraction
• Added support for MWDT C / C++ toolchain via toolchain abstraction
• Update to CMSIS v5.8.0 (Core v5.5.0, DSP v1.9.0)
• Support for M-Profile Vector Extensions (MVE) on ARMv8.1-M
• Improved thread safety for Newlib and C++ on SMP-capable systems
• IEEE 802.15.4 Software Address Filtering
• New Action-based Power Management API
• USB Device Framework now includes all Chapter 9 defines and structures
• Generic System Controller (syscon) driver and emulator
• Linker Support for Tightly-Coupled Memory in RISC-V
• Additional Blocking API calls for LoRa
• Support for extended PCI / PCIe capabilities and improved MIS-X support
• Added Service Type Enumeration (STE) with mDNS / DNS Service Discovery
• Added Zephyr Thread Awareness for OpenOCD to West
• EEPROM now can be emulated in flash
• Added both Ethernet MDIO and Ethernet generic PHY drivers

Growth Since LTS V1

Since LTS 1.14.0, the number of unique contributors to the Zephyr Project has nearly tripled from 500 to 1384. Zephyr is now supported on more than twice as many boards, increasing from 160 to 400, and now runs on 12 different architectures (counting ARM cortex-a, cortex-r, and ARC64). Our peak commit velocity has nearly doubled from 1.4 to 2.5 commits per hour.

Zephyr’s team of maintainers has doubled from approximately 25 to 50 and our team of collaborators has nearly tripled from 30 to 81.

The total number of distinct areas (subsystems, OS features, etc.) requiring maintainership in Zephyr has increased from 80 to 113, and there are no signs of slowing down.

1.14.0 (LTS V1)2.7.0 (LTS V2)Contributors5001384Boards160400Architectures812Commit Velocity1.4 commits per hour2.5 commits per hour# of Maintainers~2550# of Collaborators~3081# of Areas~80113 Major Enhancements Since LTS V1

Most of our community members have eagerly adopted tagged releases. Still, for companies that have based products on the LTS V1 release, there have been a tremendous number of major enhancements since then.

• The kernel now supports both 32- and 64-bit architectures
• We added support for SOCKS5 proxy
• Introduced support for 6LoCAN, a 6Lo adaption layer for Controller Area Networks
• We added support for Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)
• We added support for UpdateHub, an end-to-end solution for over-the-air device updates
• We added support for ARM Cortex-R Architecture
• Normalized APIs across all architectures
• Expanded support for ARMv6-M architecture
• Added support for numerous new boards and shields
• Added numerous new drivers and sensors
• Added BLE support on Vega platform
• Memory size improvements to Bluetooth host stack
• We added initial support for 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture
• CANopen protocol support through 3rd party CANopenNode stack
• LoRa support was added along with the SX1276 LoRa modem driver
• A new Zephyr CMake package has been introduced
• A new Devicetree API which provides access to virtually all DT nodes and properties
• The kernel timeout API has been overhauled
• A new k_heap/sys_heap allocator, with improved performance
• Zephyr now integrates with the TF-M (Trusted Firmware M) PSA-compliant framework
• The Bluetooth Low Energy Host now supports LE Advertising Extensions
• The CMSIS-DSP library is now included and integrated
• Introduced initial support for virtual memory management
• Added Bluetooth host support for periodic advertisement and isochronous channels.
• Added a new TCP stack which improves network protocol testability
• Introduced a new toolchain abstraction with initial support for GCC and LLVM/Clang
• Moved to using C99 integer types and deprecate Zephyr integer types
• Introduced support for the SPARC architecture and the LEON implementation
• Added Thread Local Storage (TLS) support
• Added support for per-thread runtime statistics
• Added support for building with LLVM on X86
• Added new synchronization mechanisms using Condition Variables
• Add support for demand paging, initial support on X86
• Logging subsystem overhauled
• Added support for 64-bit ARCv3
• Split ARM32 and ARM64, ARM64 is now a top-level architecture
• Added initial support for Arm v8.1-m and Cortex-M55
• Removed legacy TCP stack support which was deprecated in 2.4
• Tracing subsystem overhaul / added support for Percepio Tracealyzer
• Device runtime power management (PM) completely overhauled
• Automatic SPDX SBOM generation has been added to West
• Added an example standalone Zephyr application

Areas to Improve

New technical features and enhancements are proposed every day. However, it’s also important to periodically step back and look at how efficiently our wheels are turning as an organization. At the request of our valued community members, several areas have been tagged for improvement.

• We need more Collaborators and Maintainers (Reviewers) to match our growth
  • More reviewers mean less time in review for each PR; on average
  • Some Maintainers oversee multiple areas, giving them less time to focus
  • We want you! (if you have what it takes)
  • Technical expertise, patience, time, and a good track record of contributing
  • See Project Roles for Maintainer responsibilities
• Record and publish Zephyr commit statistics similar to the Linux kernel
• Use a finer granularity of permissions on GitHub (currently in progress)
• Provide a qualification process and Rolodex of Zephyr consultants

Looking to the Future

There are currently 107 RFC tickets open for virtually every kind of enhancement. Below are just a few that I am personally quite excited about!

• native_posix board support for macOS
• A sensor and message-bus framework (based on Android’s CHRE)
• A generic State Machine Framework
• Addition of a Pin Control API and Devicetree bindings
• A USB-C Driver Framework (based on the ChromeOS stack)
• A unified framework for multiple clock sources, domains, and timer resolutions
• Multiple network interface auto-configuration via Devicetree
• Improved support for multiple radio devices and wireless coexistence
• Improved Language and Runtime Support: MicroPython, C++, Rust, eBPF
• Improved support for ISO C, C++, and POSIX standards
• Additional support for Remote Procedure Call frameworks like gRPC and Thrift

Of course, one of the greatest facets of Zephyr’s future is the community, and we welcome all of our future community members with open arms. For those new to Zephyr, the best place to begin is the Zephyr Getting Started Guide. At any time, please feel free to reach out to us on Discord to chat.

Closing Remarks

Every second of every day, millions of Zephyr-based Internet-enabled devices wake up, process a few bytes of data, resonate at GHz frequencies, and then quietly go back to sleep, consuming precious micro-amps of battery power. While others, at the opposite end, never get to sleep at all and process immense payloads in custom hardware accelerators in some of the world’s largest data centers.

This is our community. We scale. We solve categorically hard problems. We hold each other to high standards. We help one another through thick and thin, and in doing so, we are able to achieve the most incredible things!

We’re excited to announce the release of Zephyr LTS V2. And to our community, I say thank you!

These efforts are made possible by the dozens of enterprises that support the Zephyr project. To learn how your organization can get involved, click here

The post In Case You Missed It: Zephyr LTS V2 Release appeared first on Linux Foundation.

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