Open Mainframe Project

John Mertic, Linux Foundation

Berthold Gunreben, SUSE *

James Caffrey, IBM *

Scott Fagen, CA *

David Edelsohn, IBM

Wolfram Gries, AMC and EMA

Barton Robinson, Velocity Software

Len Santalucia, Vicom Infinity

Don Spoerke, GT Software

Shu Hadijatanassov, L3C

Alex Kim, Vicom Infinity

David Rossi, IBM

Neale Ferguson, SineNomine

Klaus Rutush, IBM

Ariadinny Braz

Voting members not in attendance:

Herbert Daly, U of Bedfordshire *

Phil Tully, ADP *

Dale Hoffman, IBM *

Marcel Mitran, IBM

(voting members denoted by asterisks)

Mr. Mertic opened the meeting at 1:06pm ET. Mr. Mertic presented the following agenda for the meeting:

  • Introduce AMC and EMA

  • Update on the OpenJDK port to s390

  • Update on proposed focus projects

    • OpenStack on Z

    • Blockchain on Z

  • BountySource ideas

    • Callsign?

Introduce AMC and EMA

Mr. Mertic introduced Wolfrman Greis to introduce both EMA and AMC and their thoughts on how they could engage at a technical level.

Mr. Gunreben said there is great value in this partnership, as both groups can help the OMP better engage in Germany. Mr. Edelsohn asked if these groups focused on all operating systems for Z, and Mr. Greis said yes and that they planned to offer education in the coming year. Mr. Edelson asked which machines are in the universities, and Mr. Greis said between z9 and z13.

Update on the OpenJDK port to s390

Mr. Edelsohn indicated that all the patches to enable s390 made by SAP have been completed and merged in the hotspot and snapshots for the future OpenJDK 9 release. OpenJDK 9 is scheduled for release in Summer 2017.

Mr. Berthold asked if testing could start happening now, and Mr. Edelsohn indicated yes. Mr. Berthold expressed his appreciation for this. Mr. Santalucia asked that with OpenJDK s390 support, does that mean that the IBM or Oracle JDK is no longer required. Mr. Edelsohn said that this does mean that specifically, but does mean that any application that can run on OpenJDK on different architectures should now work on s390.

Update on proposed focus projects

Mr. Rossi gave an update on OpenStack, indicating that after the initial proposal in September there is still questions on if OpenStack is the right platform for cloud enablement and if solving the OpenStack issues on s390 should be best resolved by the Open Mainframe Project. The recommendation with this group indicated that it would be best to pursue this as an open source project, and several end-users have come forward with interest in participation. Mr. Santalucia indicated that next steps collecting feedback and defining requirements.

Mr. Rossi further asked feedback from the TSC on whether this is a worthy project for the Open Mainframe Project to focus on. Mr. Fagen had concerns of the Open Mainframe Project focusing narrowly on OpenStack on Z, and that the OpenStack community should handle this instead. Mr. Santalucia followed up saying that he felt we could supplement the work being done in the OpenStack project and not replace it. Mr. Fagen agreed that if the OMP focus was to drive more focus on Z in the OpenStack project, that would be a good thing provided we aren’t taking the place of the OpenStack code development. Mr. Rossi further said the intention is to bring more Z expertise to the OpenStack development community rather than development separately. Mr. Berthold added that there is a challenge of z/VM knowledge in OpenStack community, which the OMP could help supplement.

Conversation ensued on the whether the project should focus on OpenStack.

Mr. Mertic indicated work is moving ahead on scope for Blockchain on Z. A call was held earlier in the day and next steps are to see how to best engage in the community.

BountySource ideas

Mr. Mertic said there was a request for help in porting some of the dependencies for Callsign to Z. Mr. Mertic said he would follow up to see the exact requirements.

Meeting Cadence

The next meeting of the TSC was scheduled for January 12^th^, 2017 at 1:00pm Eastern Time.

Adjournment

Mr. Mertic closed the meeting at 2:01pm Eastern Time.