IBM Continues Advancing PowerPC For Linux

Beyond the exciting x86 architecture changes that are always under the microscope for the Linux kernel, and lately the great ARM work, IBM has an interesting set of POWER architecture changes for Linux 3.11.

Highlights of the Power PC architecture updates for the Linux 3.11 kernel merge window include:

- VFIO has come to POWER so it can be used in cases like assigning PCI/VGA adapters to guest virtual machines for use as GPU pass-through in the virturalization world.

- Support for transparent huge-pages for 64-bit Power PC processors.

- Support for the PowerPC with the PStore infrastructure so that kernel oopses and other errors can be written to their non-volatile RAM.

- Improvements to the EEH PCI error handling and recovery infrastructure.

- Support for Power8 Event-Based Branch for basically providing user-space interrupts for performance monitor events.

More details on these changes can be found via the POWER pull request for Linux 3.11.