[USER] OpenPower 720 support?

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Dave C Boutcher wrote:

> Couple of things.  First all of the support you need should be in
> kernel.org, and starting with a Gentoo ppc64 build you should be able to
> bootstrap yourself up everything you want.  You could probably hack your
> way through debian as well.

Good, that matches what Joel said as well.

> To do the kind of LPAR you want, you will need to buy an HMC (not sure
> of the price, but perhaps significant) and you will also need something
> that I think is not announced yet called the "Advanced Open
> Virtualization Something" that will let you do more than one partition
> per processor ("micropartitioning" in marketing-speak) and virtual I/O
> (virtual ethernets for example.)

Right, an HMC is on the quote list. If the advanced LPAR product is 
expensive/unavailable/unsupported on my distro, that would be an issue 
because I do need to do more than one partition per CPU.

> As Dave H said, do do DLPAR (i.e. adding/removing stuff while the OS is
> running) you will need some non-open-source tools from the IBM web site
> that are only "supported" on SLES or Red Hat.  YMMV if you are running
> on Gentoo/debian/linux-from-scratch.  I don't personally think you will
> miss any of those tools (with all due respect to those who do a
> magnificent job of writing and delivering them.)

This is what I suspected would be the case.

> If when you get all of that, I have a document on setting up virtual
> partitions which I keep saying I will put somewhere external (like
> penguinppc64.org) but haven't got around to doing yet...you can ping me
> via email and I'll send you a copy.

If I end up buying a machine I'll take you up on that.

> And finally, I think people on this list would be happy and interested
> to help you.  You might find yourself on a poster somewhere (I mean that
> in a good sense...not on a post office wall.)

That's one thing I've noticed on LKML; the crowd that does PPC64 (both 
IBM and non-IBM people) seem to be pretty reasonable to deal with :-)