[USER] OpenPower 720 support?

[Dave C Boutcher]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 08:42:02AM -0700, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> I'm looking at buying an OpenPower 720 instead of a number of x86-64 
> boxes, for use as a web hosting/email hosting/offsite data 
> storage/MySQL/etc. box. Initially I'd have 6 LPARs, growing to maybe as 
> many as 20. I'm looking at a 2-way 1.65GHz box (4-way box with 2 CPUs), 
> 4GB of RAM, FC HBAs, HMC, etc.
> 
> My question, though, is that I'm not really keen on using SLES9, and I 
> really want to use the 2.6 kernel so that rules out RHES. I am perfectly 
> comfortable building my own distro to put on this system, but I'm 
> concerned that things like LPAR support and other fancy bits are not 
> present in the kernel.org kernel and I'd be losing access to the 
> features I'm paying for.

Kevin,

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

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.)

--
Dave Boutcher