IBM Power 750 - Page 159

Chapter 3. Virtualization 145
Table 3-6 lists the support of specific programming features for various versions of Linux.
Table 3-6 Linux support for POWER7 features
See the following sources of information:
򐂰 Advance Toolchain:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/hpccentral/How+to+use+Advance+T
oolchain+for+Linux+on+POWER
򐂰 Release notes:
– ftp://linuxpatch.ncsa.uiuc.edu/toolchain/at/at05/suse/SLES_11/release_notes.a
t05-2.1-0.html
– ftp://linuxpatch.ncsa.uiuc.edu/toolchain/at/at05/redhat/RHEL5/release_notes.a
t05-2.1-0.html
Features Linux releases Comments
SLES 10 SP4 SLES 11 SP2 RHEL 5.8 RHEL 6.3
POWER6
compatibility
mode
Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s -
POWER7 mode No Yes No Yes Take advantage of the
POWER7+ and POWER7
features.
Strong Access
Ordering
No Yes No Yes Can improve Lx86
performance.
Scale to 256 cores
and 1024 threads
No Yes No Yes Base OS support is available.
Four-way SMT No Yes No Yes Better hardware usage.
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 POWER7 and
POWER7+ enablement
necessary to support kernel
build.
Advance
Toolchain support
Ye s
a
a. Execution restricted to POWER6 instructions
Ye s Ye s
a
Yes Alternative GNU Toolchain
that explores the technologies
available on POWER
architecture.
64 KB base page
size
No Yes Yes Yes Better memory utilization, and
smaller footprint.
Tickless idle No Yes No Yes Improved energy utilization
and virtualization of partially to
fully idle partitions.