IBM Power System now supports the well-known KVM hypervisor. KVM is a open source hypervisor that runs together with the Linux.
The IBM PowerKVM hypervisor brings a lot of new features to the IBM Power System environment. One of these features is the installation of a Debian on a Virtual machine..
A Debian rootfs could be found at Debian/ppc64el wiki page. In order to run this rootfs, you could use the steps described in the IBM PowerKVM Configuration and Use.
The default rootfs user and password are:
- Username: root
-
Password: abc123 (the password is expired and must be changed at the first login)
It is also possible to use debootstrap if you are not confortable with the rootfs method.
debootstrap for QEMU/KVM
This method is useful for most people. It can be used in other Debian archigtectures and even other distros.
For KVM acceleration (i.e., not full-emulation) this must be run on a POWER8 system.
Steps:
- Create an image file (i.e., virtual disk) for the root filesystem
-
Populate the image with debootstrap --foreign (i..e, can be run on other architectures)
-
Boot the image with QEMU and run debootstrap --second-stage (i.e., must be run on the POWER architecture -- or with QEMU full-emulation)
