POWER Hypervisor

The POWER Hypervisor™ provides an abstraction layer between the hardware and firmware and the operating system instances for GX host channel adapter (HCA) implementations.

POWER Hypervisor provides the following functions to use POWER6® GX HCA implementations.

UD low latency receive queues
Large page memory sizes
Shared receive queues (SRQ)
Support for more than 16 KB queue pairs. The exact number of queue pairs is determined by cluster size and available system memory.

POWER Hypervisor also contains the Subnet Management Agent (SMA) to communicate with the subnet manager and present the HCA as logical switches with a given number of ports attached to the physical ports and to logical HCAs (LHCAs).

POWER Hypervisor also contains the Performance Management Agent (PMA), which is used to communicate with the performance manager that collects fabric statistics, such as link statistics, including errors and link usage statistics.

For more information about SMA and PMA function, see the InfiniBand architecture documentation.