Specifications

Chapter 3. Virtualization 149
3.4.10 POWER7 Linux programming support
IBM Linux Technology Center (LTC) contributes to the development of Linux by providing
support for IBM hardware in Linux distributions. In particular, the LTC makes tools and code
available to the Linux communities to take advantage of the POWER7 technology and
develop POWER7 optimized software.
Table 3-6 lists the support of specific programming features for various versions of Linux.
Table 3-6 Linux support for POWER7 features
Simultaneous
Multi-Threading
(SMT)
Ye s
c
Ye s
d
Ye s Ye s
e
Ye s Ye s
c
Ye s
c
Ye s
c
Ye s
Active Memory
Expansion
No Yes
f
YesNoNoNoNoNoNo
a. Requires IBM i 7.1 TR1.
b. Will become a fully provisioned device when used by IBM i.
c. Only supports two threads.
d. AIX 6.1 up to TL4 SP2 only supports two threads, and supports four threads as of TL4 SP3.
e. IBM i 6.1.1 and up support SMT4.
f. On AIX 6.1 with TL4 SP2 and later.
Feature AIX
V5.3
AIX
V6.1
AIX
V7.1
IBM i
6.1.1
IBM i
7.1
RHEL
V5.7
RHEL
V6.1
SLES
V10
SP4
SLES
V11
SP1
Features Linux releases Comments
SLES 10 SP4 SLES 11 RHEL 5.7 RHEL 6.1
POWER6
compatibility mode
Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s -
POWER7 mode No Yes No Yes -
Strong Access
Ordering
No Yes No Yes Can improve Lx86
performance
Scale to 256 cores/
1024 threads
No Yes No Yes Base OS support
available
4-way SMT No Yes No Yes -
VSX support No Yes No Yes Full exploitation
requires Advance
Toolchain.
Distro toolchain
mcpu/mtune=p7
No Yes No Yes SLES11/GA toolchain
has minimal P7
enablement necessary
to support kernel build
Advance Toolchain
support
Ye s ,
execution
restricted to
Power6
instructions
Ye s Ye s ,
execution
restricted to
Power6
instructions
Yes Alternative IBM GNU
Toolchain
64k base page size No Yes Yes Yes -