By @michaellarabel
Publication Date: 2026-04-02 18:37:00
Following this morning’s announcement of IBM working with Arm on “dual architecture” hardware, we have some more details on at least what’s happening from the software side… It’s improving Arm virtualization on IBM Z Systems (s390).
A set of 27 patches were posted to the Linux kernel mailing list following this morning’s embargo lift announcing this Arm and IBM collaboration. IBM engineers have been working on “novel” virtualization acceleration for ARM on s390(x). Steffen Eiden of IBM explained with today’s patch series:
“By introducing a novel virtualization acceleration for the ARM architecture on
s390 architecture, we aim to expand the platform’s software ecosystem. This initial patch series lays the groundwork by enabling KVM-accelerated ARM CPU virtualization on s390. To achieve this, a common KVM layer between s390 and arm64 is introduced (see below for more details). Design considerations of arm64 on the s390 Architecture The s390 virtualization architecture is…
