As things move forward with the launches of IBM's POWER7 systems this year, there's a flurry of activities on many fronts. In particular, we've been pretty busy with the 2.6.32 kernel in many places. Red Hat has a new RHEL Version 6 in beta, the BlueBioU project of course is using 2.6.32, and Novell has announced the latest service pack for SLES 11 which is based on 2.6.32.
Red Hat's RHEL 6 is already in beta (from last month):
* http://press.redhat.com/2010/04/21/red-hat-enterprise-linux-6-beta-available-today-for-public-download/
Novell just announced their latest service pack for SLES 11 which among other things upgrades the kernel to 2.6.32:
* http://www.novell.com/promo/suse/sle11sp1.html
A key proof point at BlueBioU continues to be worked on collaboratively across many teams. Being based on the 2.6.32 enables the easy availability of a number of latest Linux technologies.
* http://bluebiou.rice.edu/
For some example performance FAQs emerging with the work on the 2.6.32 kernel base, check out:
* http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/LinuxP/Performance+FAQs
To check on current questions being posed see the Linux on Power architecture forum at:
* http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=375
Some recent questions address the holes in CPU numbering on POWER7 when SMT=2 or SMT=1 is used, how to control the DSCR settings with the ppc64_cpu command, various tools questions, how to dynamically control the SMT settings on a system, page sizes on Linux, etc. Some of the questions are driving functional updates to the commands or approaches in development, so asking a leading question there is always a good thing.
