There is no doubt the acceptance and growing popularity of Linux on Power is here.  With POWER based systems providing advantages over x86 systems in performance, capacity, memory and IO bandwidth, and reliability (I have intentionally left out the CAPI technology and am saying that discussion for another BLOG that can delve into that and the incredible capabilities it provides)   and with the latest Linux distributions from RedHat, SUSE, and Ubuntu exploiting POWER8 technology, customers are now looking at hosting mission... [More]

Tags:  linux powervm powerlinux powerkvm

by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } In June of last year, I started publicly discussing the role that little endian (LE) plays in our Linux on Power strategy with the blog, J ust the FAQs about Little Endian . Then, in August I attempted to eliminate uncertainty in my Removing the FUD and Demystifying LE (little endian) article. With the announcement of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta delivering an LE version, it is time to revisit little... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux power linux le applications jscheel

by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer A great blog entry floated through my email inbox this week that raised a broader discussion topic for me: folks may have heard about the OpenPOWER Foundation, but may not know where to read the latest information.  So, I thought I'd provide a few pointers. The OpenPOWER Foundation website is the starting point for all information about the foundation.  When all else fails, start there. Under the site " News/Events " link at the top of the page, you will... [More]

Tags:  power jscheel gpu linux powerlinux

By: Jenifer Hopper   This article discusses some basic XML tuning tips for PowerKVM guests. It helps new users get started with editing guest XML definitions, and walks through some simple tuning examples.   The article covers various options to tune the guest disk, network, cpu, and memory. It also includes some example guest resource pinning configurations for different scenarios. Applying these tips may help improve application performance by ensuring your guest is configured properly and optimized for the KVM environment.

Tags:  powerkvm performance kvm powerlinux tuning power8

by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } I couldn't resist the urge to use TLAs (three letter acronyms) to dispel the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) on my favorite topic, LE (little endian). p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } If you are like most customers (and my mother), the concept of data endianness rarely, if ever, enters your mind. You buy applications, operating systems, and computers. All you care is that the operating systems run your applications on the computer to... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux jscheel linux le

By: Tulio Magno Quites Machado Filho. A new update release for the 7.0 series is now available. This release provides many bugfixes, including: Enable support for plugins on Binutils. GCC fix to avoid discarding the file name information when using -imacros . OProfile updated the supported events for IBM POWER8 processor. Fix for Valgrind itrace not tracing the first call to library functions. Fix the usage of xl_base when preparing IBM XL compilers' settings. For download links, more information and documentation, please refer to our offi... [More]

Tags:  linux advancetoolchain power powerlinux

by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }A:link { } If you were like me and enjoyed the July 4th holiday week, you likely missed a very subtle – yet significant – event: the July 2nd release of firmware by IBM for use in the OpenPOWER Ecosystem under the Apache license, version 2.0 . This action further signifies IBM's commitment to opening up the Power architecture and fulfills an IBM's promise to the OpenPOWER Foundation . It also demonstrates cross-company innovation with the... [More]

Tags:  linux firmware openpower power ppc64le jscheel powerlinux

By: Tulio Magno Quites Machado Filho. Two new update releases for the 5.0 and 6.0 series are now available. Both of these releases are intended to fix security issues on OpenSSL: Fix for the Heartbleed bug . Fix for the SSL/TLS MITM vulnerability . For download links, more information and documentation, please refer to our official documentation page . Please let us know if you have any questions about this release. About the IBM Advance Toolchain for PowerLinux The IBM Advance Toolchain for PowerLinux is a set of open source... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux linux power advancetoolchain

by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer As promised, here is my first blog post on little endian or "LE" as we call it.  Where better place to start than with a list of frequently ask questions (FAQs)?  Hopefully, you'll find this helpful.  Let me know if you have any questions I missed. What is big endian and little endian, anyway? In order to perform operations on data, computers routinely load and store bytes of data from and to memory, the network, and disk.  This data management generally follows... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux le linux power jscheel

By: Tulio Magno Quites Machado Filho. The IBM Advance Toolchain for PowerLinux is a set of open source development tools and runtime libraries that allow users to take leading edge advantage of IBM's latest POWER hardware features on Linux. A new update release for the 7.0 series is now available, and it includes the following: OpenSSL 1.0.1g, which isn't affected by the heartbleed bug . Binutils fixes references to __ehdr_start. GCC changes for the following: Fix support for long double and _Decimal128 direct move on POWER8.... [More]

Tags:  linux powerlinux advancetoolchain power

IBM Power Systems is putting data to work! On April 23, we introduced Power Systems built for bigger data demands in the cloud, expanding world's first Linux-based open server ecosystem. This provides you with tools tuned for a platform that boosts productivity and performance by removing constraints imposed by commodity architecture, along with accelerating compute and data-intensive tasks that improves cloud economics. While I trust that you have already gotten started building and deploying on this, I would like to throw a challenge your... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux innovate power8 app_throwdown

At Impact 2014, Doug Balog and Mark Shuttleworth provided a glimpse of the work completed on POWER8 systems with Ubuntu 14.04 from Canonical. In a Keynote presentation available on Youtube , Mark Shuttleworth's team does a demo of deploying 8 KVM guests - starting from scratch, installing the OS on each guest, the application software, configuring, running, inter-connecting, and ready for work.    JuJu's and Charms are actually pretty slick.   Something good to learn in the coming days. On the Youtube video, fast forward... [More]

Tags:  juju charm ubuntu power8 powerlinux canonical

By: Tulio Magno Quites Machado Filho.  The IBM Advance Toolchain for PowerLinux is a set of open source development tools and runtime libraries that allow users to take leading edge advantage of IBM's latest POWER hardware features on Linux. A new release is available, and it includes the following: Support for little-endian (powerpc64le). Support for Ubuntu 14.04 (native and cross compiling from i386). Up-to-date packages: Glibc 2.19 OpenSSL 1.0.1g GDB 7.7 Libhugetlbfs 2.17 Boost 1.55 Technology preview of the... [More]

Tags:  advancetoolchain power little-endian powerlinux linux

Providing a glimpse of the activities around the OpenPOWER Foundation , Google and Tyan recently talked about their respective Power8 motherboards under development There are a number of articles available across the web, EnterpriseTech's article was a good summary of the work underway.    Both Tyan and Google offered some initial insights into their work.    Gordon MacKean posted  a picture of the motherboard on his Google+ circle. With a wide variety of Linux communities providing Power8 enabling, exploitation,... [More]

Tags:  tyan power8 google powerlinux openpower

P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Never before in my almost 25 year history with IBM have I anticipated a launch like that of our latest POWER8 systems. This launch releases the next generation of POWER processors in 1- and 2-socket scale-out servers with a focus on delivering new Linux solutions, especially in the area of open source clouds built on KVM – a dream come true for this “Chief Engineer.” For me, the most important announcement is the... [More]

Tags:  kvm powerlinux jscheel power power8 powerkvm linux

Here we start a working post on the many opportunities around Power Linux and open-source distro communities As Jeff Scheel posted over on Google+, he began a solicitation for help around the Debian distro Check out:  - The Debian ppc64el Port -  https://wiki.debian.org/ppc64el Calling all Debian junkies!!!  The PowerLinux family of Linux community distributions is being extended to include Debian.  Feel free to chip in on the development effort.   For those who like technical details, this port is 64-bit only (no... [More]

Tags:  canonical debian opensuse openpower fedora ubuntu powerlinux

By: Jeff Scheel, PowerLinux Chief Engineer A software provider recently said, point blank, at the beginning of our discussion, “Convince me that PowerLinux is not a new platform.” The core of my answer went like this: the value of Linux is the same for software providers as it is for customers – Linux provides a single operating system environment across different hardware platforms. Customers and partners who have both x86 Linux skills and Power System skills have all the knowledge they need to run Linux on IBM Power Systems... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux power jscheel linux

Reviewing some early and key milestones, this is a good time to look at the Texas A&M and IBM research collaboration project kicked off last month. Kevin Nowka, the Director of IBM Research in Austin Tx provides some insights into building a computational sciences infrastructure .   The infrastructure includes 2,000 compute nodes of a Blue Gene/Q, 75 PowerLinux 7R2 servers with the latest POWER7+ processors, and an IBM NeXtScale System.    The PowerLinux 7R2's are focused on big data analytics... [More]

Tags:  bluegeneq biginsights 7r2 gpfs powerlinux

If you are an IBM Business Partner or IBM employee who needed remote access to Power Systems servers in the past, you might have come across the Virtual Loaner Program (VLP). The VLP is gone now, but not to worry, it has been replaced by the Power Development Platform (PDP). In addition to the name change, the program added new features and comes with an improved web interface. As did the VLP, the PDP focuses on bringing ISVs, other Business Partners and IBM employees worldwide remote access to IBM POWER processor-based servers on the IBM AIX,... [More]

Tags:  power7 porting remote powerlinux power_systems power7+