IBM Talks Up Their New Ability For Handling ARM64 Guest VMs on s390 Hardware

One of the biggest surprises this year was IBM collaborating with Arm for "dual architecture" hardware. In addition to the IBM s390 hardware side, this "dual architecture" support for running ARM64 instructions on s390 also requires Linux KVM virtualization support with patches we've seen the past number of months and initial code merged for Linux 7.4. IBM engineer Steffen Eiden used the KVM Forum this week in Canada to talk up the hardware-accelerated, cross-architecture VMs now possible on s390. It's an interesting concept and will be curious to see how the adoption pans out. Getting this technical implementation working is far from trivial. Beyond going over the current work, there is also talk of potentially extending the functionality for more architectures in the future as well as further enhancing the guest ARM64 capabilities as well as other capabilities. Those intrigued by ARM64 on IBM s390 can learn more via the KVM Forum 2026 presentation embedded below.