IBM Continues Advancing PowerPC For Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 4 July 2013 at 10:23 AM EDT. 15 Comments
HARDWARE
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.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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