Some of the information has been superseded in the meanwhile, but the slides from my talk at the 2012 KVM Forum contain some information that may still be interesting. (Sadly, no video of the talk was recorded.)
Having a nice set of channel devices available to your OS is all fine and good; but how do you actually talk to them? This post attempts to give a high-level overview, while also explaining some more acronyms.
More …When you start trying to get familiar with channel I/O and its concepts, one thing you notice is usually a host of very similar-sounding acronyms that are easily confused. The easiest way to get a hold of this is probably to look at a small machine started by QEMU and to examine what a Linux guest sees.
More …As promised, I will write some articles about one of the areas where s390x looks especially alien to people familiar with the usual suspects like x86: the native way of addressing I/O devices.1
There is PCI on s390x, but it is a recent addition and its ↩
On s390, there are a lot of acronyms to baffle people from a non-mainframe background, even if the concepts themselves are not so strange, so I thought I’d do some writeups.1
Originally, I wanted to call this “TLAs explained”, but there ↩