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Blog | Linux on Z

Enhance QEMU on Linux on Z

By | December 21, 2021

Written by David Edelsohn, Open Mainframe Project community member and Senior Technical Staff Member, Open Source Ecosystem at IBM

Want to put your IBMz knowledge and skills to use?  You can help update the QEMU hypervisor to support newer z/Arch instructions!
QEMU is the Open Source hypervisor that includes support to emulate multiple processor architectures, including IBMz, and is a critical component for virtualization in the Cloud.  It’s an exciting component to learn about computer architecture, processor emulation and the low-level infrastructure of hypervisors.
QEMU for IBMz is lacking emulation for some newer instructions added to the IBMz architecture.  Any developer who would like to learn more about the low-level details of the IBMz architecture and build up some experience with QEMU should take a look at two feature requests opened in the Gitlab QEMU repository:
Financial bounties are available and open for negotiation.  Please comment in the issues if you are interested in working on the projects.  Fun projects to explore during the holidays!