by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer With LinuxCon North America upon us, I have been thinking a lot lately about the Power proposition of “open”. So, what? How does that help the Enterprise? My thought process around these questions flowed like this: open provides choice, choice enables flexibility, flexibility ensures greater efficiency in solutions, better solutions reduce expense. My conclusion: the Power System strategy around “open” ultimate saves customers money. As an engineer, I like logical... [More]

Tags:  jscheel powerlinux linux openpower power

Working with Altoros , we have reached a significant milestone in porting Cloud Foundry to POWER. Now all the Cloud Foundry jobs including the DEA, NATs etc run on POWER with Ubuntu LE and OpenStack. This work was done at the Oregon State University's OpenStack environment on POWER which can be requested from here . Altoros has posted a blog and video demo describing their experience here . Altoros has provided a set of Ansible playbooks that can be used to build BOSH releases with binaries and create a BOSH OpenStack Ubuntu 14.04 stemcell... [More]

If you are running Ubuntu, there is a cgroup hotplug issue to consider when changing SMT modes.  You may need to take steps to ensure that SMT threads are being used properly, see  this article for more info.

    Blog:   Ron Gordon, Mainline Information Systems Title:  Supporting for Linux on Power Options As you begin to implement solutions on Power Systems with Linux, a key element of your planning has to be how to support the environment.   There are several aspects of support and usually we first think  of “how do I get fixes and updates”.   This is only a part of what you need to understand and plan for as you also need to address areas such as:  what can I do to insure the... [More]

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 powerlinux powervm powerkvm

A new update release for the 7.0 series of the IBM Advance Toolchain for Linux on Power is now available. This is a maintenance release for the 7.0 series (7.0-7) and contains a series of fixes: The GNU C Library provides: Fixes for the following vulnerabilities: CVE-2015-1472/CVE-2015-1473 , CVE-2015-1781 , CVE-2013-7423 and CVE-2014-8121 . Fix for pow() returning incorrect results when using FMA . OpenSSL provides 14 security advisories . For download links, more information and documentation, please refer to our... [More]

Tags:  advancetoolchain linux power

Oracle has confirmed that a release of the 12cR1 Instant Clients for Linux on Power Little Endian is now planned for release.  Please review the Instant Client section of document "Release Schedule of Current Database Releases (Doc ID 742060.1)" found on My Oracle Support for this update.    To find this document log on to My Oracle Support , and search for the document id 742060.1. To review the use and capabilities of the 12c Instant Clients refer to the Oracle Database Instant Client... [More]

The Generic Work Queue Engine (GenWQE) Linux device driver supports the PCIe3 LP FPGA Accelerator Adapter (FC EJ13; CCIN 59AB) by implementing a work queue to offload tasks to the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).   This PDF describes in detail how the hardware and associated userspace library is implemented. It also provides details to application developers about developing an application to take advantage of the gzip compression provided by this hardware.     GenWQE-GZIP-for-Linux-Doc.pdf | View Details  

  This is the second part in a series of articles on the topic: Using the IBM SDK for Linux on Power to improve the performance of a large open source project where I will be using the Migration Advisor . Here we continue exploring the performance of the PHP open source project by looking for the tell-tale signs of missing optimization for the POWER platform in the source.   The Migration Advisor (MA) looks for examples in the code where it uses Intel inline assembler or Intel-specific compiler built-ins. And where this Intel specific... [More]

Tags:  advisor zen migration

A new update release for the 8.0 series of the IBM Advance Toolchain for Linux on Power is now available. This is the first release with support to RHEL6 cross-compiler and Ubuntu 14.10. It also provides: Support for lock elision on glibc. The GNU C Library provides: Fixes for the following vulnerabilities: CVE-2015-1472/CVE-2015-1473 and CVE-2015-1781 . Fix for pow() returning incorrect results when using FMA . OpenSSL provides 14 security advisories . Inclusion of Go tools . For download links, more information and documentation, please... [More]

Tags:  advancetoolchain power linux rhel6 ubuntu

A new update  ( PowerKVM 2.1.1.2 )  for the 2.1 release stream of IBM PowerKVM is now available. It can be downloaded from Fix Central via the following link: http ://w ww-9 33.i bm.c om/s uppo rt/f ixce ntra l/sw g/se lect Fixe s?pa rent =Vir tual izat ion% 2Bso ftwa re&p rodu ct=i bm/O ther +sof twar e/Po werK VM&r elea se=2 .1.1 .0&p latf orm= All& func tion =al l   This release introduces: Support for running RHEL 6.7 and SLES 11 SP4 as Guest Virtual Machines as and when those distributions are available And... [More]

Tags:  powerkvm

When I started this Zen and art of PowerLinux Performance series I had the best of intentions to contribute regularly. Then I got busy; with enabling Little Endian for Power 64-bit, which required a new ABI , plus coordinating the enablement of all the pieces of the toolchain for the new target and platform, and then supporting the bring up of multiple Linux Distributions.   Now we are mostly past the “ when will we get Distro X on hardware Y ?” and we are deep into the “ How do I tune my application for POWER?” and... [More]

Tags:  art' sdk 'zen performance

Jason Furmanek has published a nice article on his experiences and insights in setting up a NIM server (more typically done with AIX installations..) to install RHEL 6 on a Power system.   If you're an AIX customer - this could be very beneficial....     Questions are welcome on the forums.       This page emerged from an ongoing discussion on the forums.     From his article..   The process of booting and installing a Linux server from the network is valuable for many reasons. It is efficient,... [More]

Using GRE with PowerKVM 2.1.1 – A Openstack Neutron Lab Simulation. Before we begin there are few things to note: 1. OpenVswitch can be configured both as a FLOW as well as a NORMAL switch. 2. By default every switch created using “add-br” is a NORMAL vswitch. 3. This is not a GRE tutorial but a hands-on lab to create a host to host GRE tunnel and prove that it works via Virtual Machine connectivity and requires the primary knowledge of GRE. Typical Openstack installations create 3 bridges – br-int/br-tun and br-ex. Each... [More]

I will be maintaining a set of instructions for creating binary blobs for POWER8 Ubuntu LE in this blog: Name of the blob Filename Instructions power DNS   pdns-static_3.3-1_ppc64el.deb How to build deb: Make sure you have gcc <= 5.0 ( $ gcc --version ) $ sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev $ sudo apt-get install ragel $ sudo apt-get install checkinstall $ git clone https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns.git $ cd pdns $ ./bootstrap $ ./configure --with-modules="" (add modules you need) $ make $ sudo... [More]

Some colleagues from IBM and I have been working on a port of Cloud Foundry and BOSH automation on POWER 8 Ubuntu LE. In this blog, I would like to share some first steps that we have taken. Developers interested in working with IBM on various aspects of the port drop a note in this forum. At a high level, we had to create some power specific extensions as deplicted in the following figure in the green ovals: We have introduced some extensions to this github.com fork for the bosh repo. https://github.com/hashmap/bosh to create openstack... [More]

A new update release for the 6.0 series of the Advance Toolchain for Linux on POWER is now available. This is a maintenance release for the 6.0 series (6.0-7) and contains a series of fixes. Among them, it provides: OpenSSL fixes for security advisories: Segmentation fault in ASN1_TYPE_cmp fix (CVE-2015-0286) ASN.1 structure reuse memory corruption fix (CVE-2015-0287) PKCS7 NULL pointer dereferences fix (CVE-2015-0289)... [More]

Tags:  advancetoolchain linux power

OpenStack Ironic project provides bare metal management functionality. Ironic leverages common bare metal provisioning technologies such as PXE boot and IPMI to cover a wide range of hardware. It also supports plugin architecture for vendor-specific functionality. OpenStack Ironic makes it possible to create baremetal cloud. In this article let us see how one can use OpenStack Ironic to create a baremetal cloud consisting of scale-out Power servers. The overall process is not very different than setting up baremetal cloud consisting of Intel... [More]

Tags:  scale-out ironic power power8

If any of you have been scratching your head about why building MySQL client libraries from source on the new POWER8 Ubuntu LE platform doesn't produce shared libraries (libmysqlclient.so) then please read on. Here are a few hacks which might also apply to other open source projects (more specifically their configure file and config.guess files) which have not kept up with the newest platforms. Here are the steps I used to compile libmysqlclient.so from source. wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/mysql-5.1.62.tar.gz untar... [More]

Tags:  mysql ubuntu power8 le

Docker is now part of  Ubuntu  Vivid Vervet  (15.04) for Power LE.  Ubuntu Vivid which just got released, includes docker (version 1.5) support. You can find the detailed release notes here . For using docker with Vivid on either baremetal or virtual machine on Power systems , just install it from the repository, start the docker engine and off you go. Using Docker Install Docker Package $sudo apt-get install docker.io Start the service and verify the installation $sudo service docker start $sudo docker info... [More]

Tags:  power8 docker ppc64el vivid

The IBM SDK for Linux on Power team released today the GA of the SDK 1.7.0 which now only supports x86_64 and POWER Little Endian operating systems.   S upported distributions:     - ppc64le: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Ubuntu 14.04.2 LT     - x86_64: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Fedora 20 Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS   New features and changes :     - Power Performance Advisor plugin:... [More]

Tags:  sdk linux power

A wide range of applications applied to technical areas such as computational vision, chemistry, bioinformatics, molecular biology, engineering and financial analysis are using heterogeneous computing systems with general purpose GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) hardware as their high performance platform of choice. Recently launched, the IBM Power System S824L comes into play to explore use of the NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU combined with the latest IBM POWER8 CPU , providing a unique platform for heterogeneous high performance... [More]

P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }A:link { } A new update release for the 7.1 series of the IBM Advance Toolchain for Linux on Power is now available. This is the first release to support RHEL 7.1 on POWER little-endian (ppc64le). It also provides: OpenSSL provides 8 security advisories . GCC fixes an internal compiler error while using "-m32 -mpowerpc64". The GNU C Library provides: Fixes for the following vulnerabilities: CVE-2012-3406 , CVE-2014-0475 , CVE-2014-4043 , CVE-2014-5119 , CVE-2014-6040 , CVE-2014-7817 , CVE-2014-9402 ,... [More]

Tags:  linux power ppc64le advancetoolchain rhel7.1

  Businesses today are steeped in an overabundance of data that they collect and create every day. While IT is being called upon to leverage this data for insights that can transform the organization, data centers have essentially been maxed out. The mandate to deliver the insights and analytics that are hiding in the data is not feasible or cost effective within the framework of current computing capabilities.  There’s no question that it’s time for an entirely new and scalable analytics engine, driven by bigger memory,... [More]

  The business demands of today don’t cut you any slack. Zero tolerance for latency, massive data, and the need for lightning-fast decision-making call for formidable tools that will keep you ahead of the game and sharpen your strategies for what’s next.  IBM POWER8, which clearly stands as the best scale-out system for a business’s rapidly evolving needs, features a high-speed, scalable cache design that can rein in big data and fuel untold potential to power your analytics engine. The result of breakthrough... [More]

With the OpenPOWER Summit wrapped up, there is an amazing list of initial accomplishments and progress around the POWER ecosystem, across servers, processors, accelerators, and software. For a quick summary of these accomplishments, check out the OpenPOWER Summit Fact Sheet on the Expanding Ecosystem.   

In late January, I wrote about the POWER8 port-and-test possibilities for ISV’s wanting to move their solutions over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 little endian mode. More recently, my IBM colleague and Linux on Power Chief Engineer Jeff Scheel, wrote in general about developing little endian applications and detailed information on what little endian means in an x86 port, performance best practices, where to start, and why now is the time for Linux on Power.  With this post, I want to put more thought behind what an individual... [More]

  If you missed my post last week on the IBM POWER8 Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface, or CAPI, you might want to read that first . CAPI can also be leveraged as the basis for flash in-memory expansion. An innovative solution designed to reduce latency and speed up access to data, CAPI Flash creates a bigger memory store, which as we know, is the driving force behind fast access to data.  While CAPI is designed to speed up workloads, CAPI Flash serves to significantly lower operational and deployment costs by... [More]

  Big data has taken a toll on traditional computing systems.  Microprocessor performance simply has not kept pace with exponential increases in information, coupled with heightened demands for speed, analytics and cost effectiveness.   Until the introduction of the IBM POWER8 Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface, or CAPI, industry attempts to deploy hardware acceleration solutions that addressed the performance shortfall had not measured up to the challenge.  Two key hurdles prevented the broad deployment of hardware... [More]