By: Daisy Chang.   The details of this alert have been posted on the Linux Alerts site.  Please see Required Linux driver update for selected POWER7 servers and adapters for details.

Tags:  linux powerlinux power service

By: Daisy Chang. Did you know that IBM maintains a site called Linux Alerts dedicated to important notices for Power systems running the Linux operating system?  This site is updated whenever a known issue is discovered. See the Linux Alerts site for new updates that are required for some Power7 servers and adapters .

Tags:  powerlinux linux service power

Alphabet Soup: xCAT By: Heather Crognale.   When you're ready to provision a system in your cloud or cluster, you can go through each step on your own, or you can use the xCAT: Extreme Cloud (or Cluster) Administration Toolkit . The xCAT is a collection of tools, most of which are script-based, that you can use to build, configure, administer, and maintain Linux clusters. You can use xCAT on any cluster, but it works particularly well on high-performance clusters, horizontal-scaling clusters, and administrative clusters. The xCAT can be used... [More]

Tags:  alphabetsoup heathercrognale xcat cloud clusters

By:  Bill Buros.  In the continuing journey of performance improvements with GCC, numerous development and performance teams recently hit an interesting milestone with results taking advantage of GCC compilers.     The bottom-line difference between similar publishes of SPECint_rate_base2006 has broken the 10% difference milestone on Base measurements.    These results are taking advantage of GCC-4.6.1-ibm-r176948 build.   The bottom-line difference is calculated by taking the scores of 12 different programs and doing something called a "... [More]

Tags:  performance ibmxl benchmarks advancetoolchain speccpu2006 gcc

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

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } By: Brent Baude.     I just wanted to bring some attention to the recent announcement around a Fedora 16 Alpha for ppc64.  Detials can be found in the release announcement .  While this is only an Alpha, it has proven to be a rather decent effort and quite stable. For those with ppc64 hardware, I would encourage you to check out the release notes for the alpha.  This should give you some insight into any problems we have already identified. To find out where to download the Fedora... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux ranger fedora linux power

By: Robert MacFarlan.  IBM, in collaboration with the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University, has contributed access to a new POWER7 server for use by the GCC development community.  Quoting the email list announcement the configuration looks like: "The server is an IBM Power 730 Express server configured with 16 POWER7 cores each with 4 hardware threads at 3.55 GHz, 64 GB of RAM and a few TB of disk. It is running Fedora Core 16 alpha."   Check out the recent blog posting on Fedora 16 Alpha for ppc64.   The GCC Community... [More]

Tags:  ibmpowersystems fedora gcc news

By: Wainer dos Santos Moschetta.   It was released the version 0.8 of IBM SDK for Linux on POWER with several improvements: New IBM Eclipse SDK 3.7.1 New Eclipse Linux Tools 0.8.1 New IBM Java SDK 6.0-9.2 Enhanced IBM Migration Advisor plug-in Added new porting problem checkers Intel/x86 specific syscalls checker Intel Specific API (IPP, MKL, MPI) checker Performance Degradation checker Added customization options to Migration Advisor checkers Enhanced IBM Source Code Advisor and binary optimization plug-in Several UI enhancements Added support... [More]

Tags:  linux powerlinux power ibm-sdk-lop wainersm

By: Jessica Erber-Stark.  Need a quick reference for setting up your Power Linux system?  See Getting started with Linux on Power Systems Servers . After your system is up and running, use the IBM Installation Toolkit Simplified Setup Tool to easily configure open source workloads .    Many of our Power Linux users also asked for a concise guide about setting up virtualization on their system.  The Getting started with virtualization using PowerVM topic provides an overview of the roadmap for virtualizing your system, specifics about the... [More]

Tags:  powerlinux documentation linux power jerberstark

By: Bill Buros.  Recently, the IBM SDK for Linux on Power released   another beta update  of the environment for developing, debugging, and doing performance analysis of programs running on Power systems.    On a regular basis, people ask about the SDK and wonder "So... what exactly can this do?" .    Being a little tired of creating more and more wiki pages, I'm hoping that the video approach might be more interesting and quickly informative (not to mention it provided a nice tangent on the few days before the Thanksgiving break).  ... [More]

Tags:  benchmarks performance ibm-sdk-lop videos

By: Bill Buros.  I thought this would be a relatively trivial exercise, but as with any good technology answer, it depends.   It depends on your server, how it's controlled, and the distro releases you have.   In this case, I have a Power7 server connected to an HMC with RHEL 6.1 installed on the server which is connected to a previously enabled RHEL 6.1 yum repo.      NOTE: That "enabled RHEL 6 yum repo" is an important assumption.   You can check that you have that enabled with the command   #   yum repolist   and look for the base... [More]

Tags:  performance advancetoolchain rhel repository

  By: Janet Morgan. The IBM Installation Toolkit for Linux version 5.1 released on Dec 12, 2011.  The Installation Toolkit simplifies installing Linux on Power Systems, helping you to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in just a few clicks.  The toolkit also provides IBM value-added software to fully exploit the Power platform, including the IBM Installation Toolkit Simplified Setup Tool.  The Simplified Setup Tool guides you through the process of quickly and easily configuring one or more open source workloads on... [More]

IBM Wins “Best Linux Server Vendor” Award   By: Robert MacFarlan.     Linux Journal just released their 2011 Readers’ Choice Awards. I am very pleased to share in this blog that IBM is the winner in the  “Best Linux Server Vendor”  category, for the second year in a row. Every year, Linux Journal invites its readership to cast their vote for their favorite Linux vendor. This year, over 20 server vendors were nominated for the “Best Linux Server Vendor” award including Dell, HP and Sun Microsystems. The awards are announced in the  December... [More]

Tags:  power7 linux

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