IBM Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL)

The Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) is a specialty engine processor on IBM System z mainframe servers that is dedicated to Linux workloads. Operational efforts, software costs, energy use and hardware footprint are reduced when Linux is deployed on IFL rather than general-purpose processors.

The IFL allows additional processing capacity for Linux workloads only. While other operating systems cannot run on IFL processors, it does support z/VM virtualization and IBM Wave for z/VM software.

The IFL on zEnterprise is also fast enough to host more virtual servers per processor core than other server platforms. It can host up to 60 virtual servers on a zEC12 system.

IBM offers two other specialty engines: IBM System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) and IBM System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP). The zIIP helps centralize data on the mainframe and the zAAP processor runs Web-based applications and service-oriented architectures.