zswap" is discussed, with some initial performance data provided to demonstrate the potential benefits for a system (partition or guest) which has constrained memory and is beginning to swap memory pages to disk. The technique improves the throughput of a system, while significantly reducing the disk I/O activity normally associated with page swapping. We also explore how zswap works in conjunction with the new compression accelerator feature of the POWER7+ processor to potentially improve the system throughput even more than... [More]

Tags:  memory performance lkml zswap compression powerlinux power7+ future

By Jeff Scheel As you likely have heard, Arvind Krishna, IBM General Manager for Development and Manufacturing in the IBM Systems & Technology Group, announced that Power Systems would be supporting KVM.  This is an exciting announcement for numerous reasons that I'll defer for another posting.  For this blog entry, I thought I'd do some question/answer session based on common questions I've been asked in the past couple weeks.  However, before I do so, I need to remind you that these are our current thoughts at... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux linux kvm jscheel power

  By: Anirban Chatterjee. This month, the PowerLinux team is announcing the biggest technology change in PowerLinux servers since we launched, with the availability of our POWER7+ chips on the platform. POWER7+ is more than just a speed bump on our POWER7 processors.   Our hardware teams have worked hard to increase the flexibility of the platform, bringing balanced performance increases while keeping other factors like energy consumption at bay.   Some examples:   We’ve doubled the memory capacity in servers like the 7R1 and 7R2.... [More]

Tags:  performance powerlinux cost power7+

By: Breno Leitão.   This tutorial explains how to create a RAID device on PowerLinux machines using an array of disks. This step by step tutorial includes identifying the disks, formatting them, combining them in a RAID array, creating a partition and, finally, creating a file system on this partition.   Introduction The PowerLinux machines support a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) card. A RAID card is a device that combines a set of  physical disks into a logical unit to achieve a better performance and more... [More]

Tags:  brenohl disks sas raid ipr sdd powerlinux

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

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

By: Bill Buros.  Within the Linux open-source community, and across the Power systems, there are a number of new, emerging, and in some cases maturing technologies actively being worked on, prototyped, and prepared for enterprise-class deployment.   Members of the IBM Linux Technology Center around the world are involved with these projects, collaborating with peers across the open-source community.   Over the coming weeks and rolling into next year, here on the PowerLinux Technical Community we plan to begin highlighting these technologies in... [More]

Tags:  deepdive linux 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: Jeff Scheel.  Ever wondered what IBM means when they say "Power Linux"?  I get questions all the time like, "How does Power Linux differ from RHEL or SLES?"  So, I thought perhaps it might be time to address this in writing, in a common place.   Here's the simple answer: Power Linux generally refers to all supported Linux distributions that run on IBM Power Systems servers.  This means that Power Linux includes all Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) versions.  We simply say... [More]

Tags:  power linux powerlinux jscheel

By Kent Yoder     I've just released a white paper with some info on using the encryption and random number generation hardware accelerators in the POWER7+ CPU in Fedora Linux.    It covers a few areas: 1. Background on the hardware and software architecture 2. Setting up Fedora to use the accelerators for disk encryption and IPSec 3. How to monitor that you're really getting hardware acceleration    Hope you find it useful, and don't hesitate to send me questions or comments!

Tags:  powerlinux linux encryption power7+ rng fedora crypto

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

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 powerlinux remote power_systems power7+

By: Jeff Scheel. What an exciting week in Miami, FL!!!  I spent last week at Power Technical University, helping people Think Power Linux.  We had lots of great discussions.  A big "thank you" goes out to all who attended sessions, a bigger "THANK YOU" to those who asked questions and participated in the discussion.   Here are some my key thoughts from the event: The interest in Linux continues to increase.  Although I don't keep formal counts, attendance at the Linux sessions is up over last year which was better than the... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux linux jscheel power

By: Fabio Dassan dos Santos   The IBM Installation Toolkit for PowerLinux goes beyond just trying to speed-up your typical Linux installation, by also delivering an interesting set of tools around system update and recovery.   One of the new and noteworthy features for this 5.3 release, the LPAR Cloning and Restoration tool ,  focuses on extending value in this category by providing a quick and easy way of creating re-usable system images across LPARs.   Through very few steps, it is possible to achieve the following with this new tool:   Save... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux ibm_installation_toolkit restore clone power linux install tooling

By: Jeff Scheel. Two weeks ago, I blogged about my thoughts after attending Power Technical University in Miami.  This week, I bring you my thoughts from our event in Copenhagen, Denmark.   It never ceases to amaze me what I learn at these events.  While the topics I presented were identical to the session in Miami two weeks ago, I still learned a bundle from the Power Linux customers who attended in Copenhagen.   Here are my thoughts from this week: Again, I took a significant number of business cards to Copenhagen and still ran out before the... [More]

Tags:  power linux powerlinux jscheel

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 power8 tuning

By: Jeff Scheel. As I've often mentioned in my blogs, I like to answer questions which I've been very asked frequently. Today's topic provides more details about our marketing slogan "Industry standard, Tuned to the task". We've worked so hard to eliminate the myth that PowerLinux is different (see my blog What does IBM mean when it says, "PowerLinux?" ) that we're now getting questions like: Will my (x86) Linux application just run on PowerLinux? Can I use the same DVDs to install my PowerLinux or Power System server as... [More]

Tags:  linux jscheel powerlinux power

By: Brent Baude.   On May 11th, Fedora announced a beta for F17 for ppc64.  This is another milestone in the march towards Fedora 17 for the powerpc architecture.   The beta announcement itself can be found here ->  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_17_Beta_PPC_Announcement   Yeah, lots of packages have been updated and so forth but there are two interesting pieces I'd like to draw some attention towards.  Firstly, adoption of grub2 continues in the beta.  We smoothed out some of the rough edges since the alpha timeframe and have a number... [More]

Tags:  linux powerlinux power ranger fedora

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: Caecilie Hampel .  The SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is one of the most popular ERP applications and available on Power Linux since 2004. The combination of SAP ERP and Power Linux has shown market leading benchmark results as well as continous reliability and maintainability. This combination is now also described in a new SAP paper showing a sample SAP architecture on Power Linux. An ERP system setup requires an optimal environment and landscape architecture. Therefore the new SAP on Power Linux reference architecture... [More]

Tags:  sap linux power erp powerlinux

By: Jeff Scheel.  I hope you "Think" our Power Linux community is starting to come together.  It's taking some time to bring the pieces together, but we're making progress.  Since Rome wasn't built in a day, hopefully you'll understand if the Think Power Linux community takes a couple months.   Speaking of Rome and building, did you know that IBM's effort with Power Linux is over 10 years old.  Yes, I was one of the original team members focused on putting Linux on the iSeries.  That mission grew into the ppc64 kernel and glibc that... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux experts power linux jscheel

By: Jeff Scheel. Life as the PowerLinux Chief Architect involves answering many questions, some of which need lengthy explanations.  One such example is whether PowerLinux is a Power operating system or a Linux operating system.  In some ways this discussion reminds me of the campfire scene from the 1986 movie Stand by Me where the boys deeply contemplate Disney characters.  Essentially the discussion went this way: Mickey's a mouse, Donald's a duck, Pluto's a dog, what is Goofy?  The discussion about PowerLinux generally follows similar flow:... [More]

Tags:  linux jscheel power powerlinux

By: Jeff Scheel. A couple weeks ago, someone sent me a link from the developerWorks PowerVM forum about installing Debian on a POWER7 box.  The post was created by Tux11 (Dennis Schneck) who graciously agreed to create a developerWorks wiki.   Here is the new Debian 6 on Power7 LPAR wiki.   I strongly encourage that if you have interest, if you're running Debian today on POWER, or if you would like to doing so in the future, please help Dennis and the community keep this wiki alive and accurate.  I cannot THANK him enough for his efforts in... [More]

Tags:  linux power powerlinux jscheel debian

By: Jeff Scheel. It's been a few weeks since I have posted.  I was on-the-road, doing what I affectionately call "dog on pony shows" where I am "just a dog."  The trip started with 4 days of business meetings in Birmingham, UK.  Most of these included presentations at the IBM STU on PowerLinux Trends and Direction as well as the IBM Software Development Toolkit.  Following the event, we met with various customers, business partners, and system integrators in Bracknell, UK; Amsterdam, NL; and Brussells, Belgium. Let me... [More]

Tags:  power powerlinux linux jscheel

By: Brent Baude.   Fedora has announced a ppc64 Fedora 16 beta last week.  The announcement can be found at the following URL:   https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F16_Beta_PPC_release_announcement There are many improvements between the Alpha and Beta for ppc64.  Many of them revolve around automated console detection for IBM ppc64 hardware.  The desktop is also improved and we now have a functioning Firefox.    This is a community-based effort and as such we encourage folks to participate. The best mechanism to speak with the team behind this... [More]

Tags:  power powerlinux linux fedora ranger

By Jeff Scheel Everyone remembers Cheers , the 1980s television sitcom that included the well-dressed, but slightly funny looking Norm who always entered the bar as everyone called out "Norm!"  I suspect that most of us can remember several lines from the theme song, "...Where everybody knows your name, And they're always glad you came..." But, If you can't remember the them, I know that ALL of us who watched the show want to be Norm and have our name called out as we enter the room. Enterprise 2013 was my... [More]

Tags:  linux powerlinux 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 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

By: Jenifer Hopper     Are you interested in better understanding memory access performance? A new article, Untangling memory access measurements - memory latency explains how to use an example benchmark called lat_mem_rd to measure memory read latency on IBM® Power Systems™ servers running Linux.   This article takes a practical approach to measuring memory latency performance, from understanding initial results to moving on to examining the effects of more in-depth system settings and... [More]

Tags:  power linux power7+ powerlinux latency performance memory benchmarks