How To
Summary
How to set up AIX to take advantage of the NX/gzip accelerator on a POWER9™ based IBM Power System™.
Objective
Environment
If you are using a POWER9™ based IBM Power System™ and it is running Firmware version 940, the user mode NX accelerator is enabled.
The hardware accelerator provides a massive performance increase on compression/decompression compared to running the process in software on the general cores.
The LPAR's processors MUST be in POWER9 mode, POWER9_base mode does not enable the accelerator. See this blog about processor compatibility modes
This page is specific to AIX, although the accelerator is available to any operating system ...
as long as the necessary libraries are installed and the programs are compiled to use them.
There is a great whitepaper about the accelerators in POWER9 and z15 chips:
Steps
Note: we assume that you are familiar with installing software in AIX. Using a NIM server is strongly recommended.
The LPAR must be running AIX V7 TL4, I used 7200-04-02-2016.
You can find the release by running
# oslevel -s
7200-04-02-2016
7200-04-02-2016
If "oslevel -s" does not report what you are expecting, see this blog for more details:
The
zlibNX library needs to be installed. Here is a KnowedgeCenter page.It is an enhanced version of the
zlib compression library that supports hardware-accelerated data compression and decompression by using co-processors called Nest accelerators (NX) on IBM® POWER9™ processor-based servers. The zlibNX library is available in IBM AIX® 7.2 with Technology Level 4 Expansion Pack, and later.So, you'll need the Expansion Pack.
See the Release Notes.
It can be downloaded from the ESS website:
You don't need to install all of the Expansion Pack for this exercise, just zlibNX (7.2.4.0 NX accelerated zlib compression library )
For testing, I used xgzip. It is available from the AIX Web Download Pack.
You download it into a directory, cd into the directory, run "inutoc ." and then smitty install_latest.
Results:
testfile 5,412,177,920 bytes (an old, uncompressed HMC backup)
AIX 7200-04-02-2016
MTM 9009-22A = S922
FW 01VL940_41
gzip V1.10
xgzip V4.0.20
xgzip V4.0.20
As you can see xgzip in POWER9 mode is easily the fastest. It is nearly 6x as fast as the others.
Additional Information
Related Information
Document Location
Worldwide
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Document Information
Modified date:
22 September 2020
UID
ibm16243342