The first effort, the "Bigfoot" project, developed by Linas Vepstas in late 1998 through early 1999, was an independent distribution and has since been abandoned.
Think Blue Linux was an early mainframe distribution consisting mainly of Red Hat packages added to the IBM kernel.
IBM manager Karl-Heinz Strassemeyer of Böblingen in Germany was the main lead to get Linux running on S/390.
According to IBM, as of May 2006[update], over 1,700 customers were running Linux on their mainframes; some examples are Nomura Securities, Home Depot, and the University of Pittsburgh.
The first layer virtualization is provided by the Processor Resource and System Manager (PR/SM) to deploy one or more Logical Partitions (LPARs).
[7] With the zEC12, zBC12, and later models, the HiperSocket concept is extended beyond the physical machine boundary via an RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) adapter to facilitate a secure and high-speed inter-system communication.
[citation needed] IBM mainframes allow transparent use of redundant processor execution steps and integrity checking, which is important for critical applications in certain industries such as banking.
IBM Z provides fault tolerance for all key components, including processors, memory, I/O Interconnect, power supply, channel paths, network cards, and others.
[21] Nearly every free or open-source software package available for Linux generally is available for Linux on IBM Z, including Apache HTTP Server, Samba, JBoss, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP, Python programming language, Concurrent Versions System (CVS), GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), LLVM, Perl, and Rust,[22] among many others.
[23] Red Hat and SUSE offer mainline support for their distributions running Linux on IBM Z.
[26] Some standard Linux software applications are readily available pre-compiled, including popular closed-source enterprise software packages such as WebSphere,[27] IBM Db2[28] and Oracle[29] databases and applications, SAP R/3, SAP ERP,[30] and IBM's Java Developer's Kit (JDK),[31] to name only a few.
Potential issues include endianness (Linux on IBM Z is big-endian) and reliance on non-portable libraries, particularly if source code is not available.