Does anyone here have any experience with Linux on POWER?

[Sunner]

Has anyone here run Linux on any of IBM's POWER boxes? Primarily interested in the p5/POWER5 series.
I'm looking at SuSE or Redhat, since those are officially supported by IBM.

Just looking for general impressions, works well? Big differences compared to running it under x86? Anything else that's noteworthy?

Anyone?

 

[drag]

I don't think many would know...

Anyways there is a fairly established PowerPC community and Power and PowerPC are pretty much the same archatecture from what I understand.

And since the PowerPC's are the 2nd most common Linux desktop/server systems behind the x86/x86-64 systems then it should be fairly mature and familar. Of course the bootloader is going to be different and not all programs will work, especially stuff like multimedia/codecs that have optimized code for x86 instructions....

But that's just a guess.

From Penguinppc.org:

What hardware does it run on?
PPC Linux runs on a wide range of hardware, from embedded systems like the TiVo Series 1 to Power Macintosh desktops all the way up to high-end pSeries servers. Processors supported include the embedded families: 405, 440, 850, 860, 8500; the desktop families: 603, 604, 750 (G3), 74xx (G4), 970 (G5); and the server families: POWER3, RS64, POWER4, POWER5.

Those processors can be found in hardware platforms like the CerfCube, Power Macs, and the p690 high-end server

A dual Power5 workstation system would be a kick-@ss system to have to screw around with.

(also PPC64 has been kicking around since 1995 or so, and enterprise versions of Linux have supported it for a number of years now)

Never used it, though. Tried to talk my boss into installing linux on the s/390 so that they could hook the system up to a PC-based file server, but it was decided it was to much work and the OS we are using won't talk to the Linux stuff well anyways. Of course this has absolutely nothing to do with Power.

 

[Sunner]

Yeah, I'm thinking more along how the entire system works(distro and server) rather than "just" the kernel/CPU.
As for application support, that's not an issue since it'll be running DB2 primarily, and IBM is happy to help with that

 

[drag]

I donno then.

Maybe ask at the Gentoo forums, plenty of people there run on PPC platforms, although I doubt any of them run on IBM Power hardware.

Or more likely the Debian PPC mailing lists/irc. I've seen people talking about getting IBM to support Debian on their server platforms although it's not a "official" OS and don't garrentee results like they would with Redhat/Suse.

(Debian/PPC runs on the "CHRP" (modern power) platform, along with the PPC and the older 32bit stuff.)

Those places you'll find people using them, I am supposing.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: drag
I donno then.

Maybe ask at the Gentoo forums, plenty of people there run on PPC platforms, although I doubt any of them run on IBM Power hardware.

Or more likely the Debian PPC mailing lists/irc. I've seen people talking about getting IBM to support Debian on their server platforms although it's not a "official" OS and don't garrentee results like they would with Redhat/Suse.

(Debian/PPC runs on the "CHRP" (modern power) platform, along with the PPC and the older 32bit stuff.)

Those places you'll find people using them, I am supposing.

I guess I'll have to look around a bit.
I just figured, since there are a bunch of admins around here maybe one of them was using the Linux/p5-POWER combo at work

 

[drag]

who knows? If there are, and there should be...

But it may take a while.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: drag
who knows? If there are, and there should be...

But it may take a while.

True dat, with be being on the other side of the big pond, most people won't see this for a while.
At least this little conversation servers as a nice series of bumps

Why are you awake by the way? Isn't Nebraska at something like GMT-5? Or -8 even?

 

[drag]

4:15.(am)

I work graveyard shift. Why do you think I have so much time to spend typing out long winded messages all night?

Just a lowly little tape monkey with a Windows 95 machine and the internet. That and a bunch of ancient IBM mainframe hardware dating back to the S/370 days.

(oh ya the DASD units are attached to the proccessor unit with fiber channel interconnects, and the proccessors is a earlier mindrange dual core (but not for mutliproccessing!! One CPU core calculates what the other CPU core is calculating and if the results are different then it calls home to IBM over a modem.) S/390 unit that has a 31bit VM address range. This stuff is so freaking alien compared to PC stuff...)

(Oh, and Linux can still run on it, if we realy wanted to. )

 

[Sunner]

Yeah I know about the mainframes "cpu redundancy", read an excellent article about it over at Ace's a year back or so, cool stuff

Here it is in case anyone's interested

 

[Nothinman]

I would imagine it would be 99% the same as x86 Linux. I have Linux running on both Alpha and Sparc64 boxes and while the initial installation is a little different because of the BSD partitioning schemes and the bootloader has to be different, once the OS is up all of the tools are exactly the same.