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IBM Reveals New Virtual Linux Environment
jenwren1010 writes to mention that IBM has just announced the new open beta version of their virtual Linux environment that allows users to run x86 Linux programs on POWER processor-based IBM System p servers. "Designed to reduce power, cooling and space by consolidating x86 Linux workloads on System p servers, it will eventually be released as the [rolls-off-the-tongue] 'IBM System p Application Virtual Environment (System p AVE).' With a 31.5% global revenue share during 2006, IBM hopes to build on System p UNIX success and extend firmly into the Linux marketplace. Considering there are almost 2,800 applications that already run natively on Linux on System p servers, the chances are good that it will succeed."
When's it out I want to try it!
IBM invented the EVIL company!
Too late. Xen, QEMU, and VMWare already captured this market.
I don't get it, aren't almost all Linux programs able to build for pretty much any architecture? The only use for emulation would be binary-only proprietary software that's built for x86 only. And even there it should be pretty trivial for the vendor to port it to POWER.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I think it's pretty cocky of IBM to do this while the SCO case is still before the courts. It may be a case of the hand that steals not knowing what the hand that conceals is doing This time it might get a slap!
I recommend SCOX. It's a BUY.
T_A
what?
It's been my experience that IBM's power architecture isn't really known for being "green". Can anyone provide some expertise behind the statement that running Linux VM's on the P hardware will really save energy in heating and cooling over other concepts like a rack of 1-U rack servers, a VMWare/Xen type solution on x86 hardware, or some type of blade solution?
This is so cool, in the face of SCO. And, I guess IBM customers are willing to pay for IBM's services, too.
What assets does SCO have today? 50 used P4 2.3 GHz with 1GB RAM, and a single 40GB HD, each?
I never understood the push for Linux on iSeries or pSeries. To me, if you want 'nix on pSeries just run AIX.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
I recommend SCOX. It's a BUY.
Hi Darl, long time no see. You guys still printing SCOX shares in toiletpaper format? I'll try a couple rolls if they're still less than 1.99 apiece.
--
captcha is prisons. Do you ever get that feeling of impending doom, Darl? You might want to keep an eye out for it. Them signs are all over out there, man. Them signs, they really are.
In the current generation of Power CPUs, you can implement micropartitions, akin to "this partition uses .1 CPUs", which if you've got spare computational power available on your AIX system, you could create additional partitions for X86 use. Also, since the partitions have the ability to communicate directly with each other without going over an external network, you could have in one chassis an AIX database with a linux based webserver in different partitions, both sharing the same fibrechannel cards and external gigE/10Gig network connections.
Transitive has a news article ... it's them again, same tech provider as Apple uses for their Rosetta product (obviously, reverse of the technology, Intel -> PPC, instead of PPC -> Intel).
http://transitive.com/news/news_20070423.htm
They could have added Power virtualization and x86 to Power dynamic translation (and vice versa). Wouldn't that be better?
How's this:
A:
Many Linux users reach Google via Firefox or Opera or Konqueror.
Around the time of the inversion it was common to have browser-integrated searches.
Built-in Google Searches mean half as many hits to Google.com --
No need to download: _________ (Search) (Lucky)
Work smarter, not harder!
B:
Windows lost about as much % as Linux. Sounds like an upsurge in crawlers to Google as well as Mac popularity.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I think it'd be a lot more worthwhile to measure how many people use Linux, rather than how many people don't know what Linux is, but are trying to find out. Unless, that is, that you believe that Linux has 30% the marketshare of Windows.
This would be more interesting if it extended to the G4/G5 PowerPC platforms.
Don't worry though, we don't think all mac users are self obsessed idiots like your good self, most of them are quite normal. if you are however trying to point out that the mac is better because there are more people searching for it, maybe you should wonder how off-putting this behaviour is. Grow up.
At the bottom are some good details:
"Runs most x86 Linux applications except those that * Directly access HW; * Are hardware architecture specific; * Provide unique kernel modules; or * Use instructions added later than the Pentium II processor, e.g. SSE2.""All application components and plug-ins must meet these qualifications. Support for x86 Linux applications requires an Red Hat 4 update 4 or Novell SLES 9 with Service Pack 3 of the Linux operating system."
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Why, we could even load them with Ubuntu ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Easy. 9 out of 10 people know what a Mac is, but nobody's ever heard of "OS X," and hence, nobody searches for it. This is obvious to those of us who don't suffer from a near-autistic anal retentiveness about the distinction between software and hardware. In short, no one but a Linux dweeb would spell it "OSX" instead of "Mac."
...does it run Linux?
Oh.
As far as I remember one of the original goals of PPC architecture in the times of original IBM/Moto/Apple consortium 15 years ago was to be able to emulate "other" (x86, maybe? ;-) ) processors efficiently. Strangely I have not heard about something like this being actually used up until today! (Yes, I know that POWER != PPC, but I think the parts are still there).
Paul B.
Xbox 360 is PowerPC, right? Is that similar enough to get any benefit from this?
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Don't link to a blog looking for ad impressions.
The crappy blog even has the link to IBM's page wrong.
Here is the real article.
Power5, Power5+, Power6, etc. are very powerful server processors, more powerful than x86. Here are some specs for Power6, due out in a couple months:
From Wikipedia
"The POWER6 will be using approximately 790 million transistors and 341 mm large fabricated on an 65 nm process. It is expected to run faster than 5 GHz when released in mid 2007[2] but the company has noted prototypes have reached 6 GHz.[3] POWER6 reached first silicon in the middle of 2005[4] and finished products will be available in mid 2007.[5] Dr Frank Soltis, an IBM chief scientist, said IBM had solved power leakage problems associated with high frequency by using a combination of 90nm and 65nm parts in the POWER6 design.[citation needed] The processor is a dual core design and will have 128 kB of L1 cache (64 kB data + 64 kB instruction), an eight-way, set-associative design with a two-stage pipeline supporting two independent 32-bit reads or one 64-bit write per cycle.[6] Each core will have a 4 MB "semi shared" L2 cache, where the cache is assigned a specific core, but the other has a fast access to it. The two cores share a 32 MB large L3 cache which is off die, using an 80 GB/s bus.[7] Each core will have two integer units, two binary floating-point units, and a decimal floating-point unit, and is capable of two way SMT. The binary floating-point unit incorporates "many microarchitectures, logic, circuit, latch and integration techniques to achieve [a] 6-cycle, 13-FO4 pipeline," according to a company paper.[6] The POWER6 will have support for decimal arithmetic. 50 new floating point instructions handle the decimal math and conversions between binary and decimal.[7] This is a feature currently present in the processors powering IBM's System z and is a necessity in POWER6 if the eClipz-mission is to succeed.[8] There will be an AltiVec unit to POWER6, and the processor will be fully compliant with the new Power ISA v.2.03 specification. POWER6 will also take advantage of ViVA-2, Virtual Vector Architecture, that enables the combination of several POWER6 nodes so act as a single Vector processor."
Linux guys are used to thinking command line, as such, their words/phrase linear memory functions are better, no need to re-search what you are already know about. Spatially, mac guys know where and how to search, but they wind up doing it over and over again, for the same stuff, because they are always off daydreaming and spacing out as they work on their "artistic" endeavors....
..flamboyant, so they save net surfing steps all the time. Logical+practical actions vs. emotional+impulsive actions, so there ya go, your answer!
;)
In addition, Linux guys are more frugal and practical, rather than being profligate and
And Linux guys are also smart enough to use this new invention called "bookmarks".
deja vu...
is there any way of stopping this guy? I've seen this comment too many times in the last day.
Wonder how this compares to em86? I recall mention of that a few years back as a way to run x86 linux apps on alpha cpus. Not sure DEC/Compaq/HP ever released the source to the x86 execution engine, but em86 was pretty cool back in the day nonetheless..
that's because he's running on 0.1 of one CPU of a crappy power pc box and thus hit the submit buttons multiple times thinking slashdot was bogged down
Regardless of how practical this is, it's an awesome checkbox feature for corporate weenies advocating the POWER architecture superminis with no clue about their true strengths.
"Look, this machine is so powerful it can run qemu user-mode emulation of another processor in its spare time! Let's see your Dell cluster emulate an x86!"
not really similar; SCO (the original SCO, of course) had a software emulation layer to run Linux binaries on top of it's own x86 Unix. it was an ABI emulation, not a processor emulation.
i think there's something similar for BSD, Solaris, AIX... all other Unix players want to run Linux apps.
-Kz-
The source link in the blog is bad. Here's the actual IBM announcement:
4 24.wss
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21
Just a friendly suggestion to slashdot editors: why do you often post to other blogs with links to links to source material instead of directly posting the source material? That's not news it's meta-news. I can understand crediting the folks who brought it to your attention, but it's nice to see the source for myself.
Actually, speaking of Windows, Wine could probably run in that environment...
linux pwns!!!
COYBOYNEAL IS GAY HES GAY GAY GAY!!!
trollse pwns
MOAR
YESHZ
ORLY PWNAGEZ
d desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu desu
AVE' IT!
- Dan
True. In my (admittedly limited) experience though, IBM hardware generally gets aimed at organizations whose IT budgets are already fairly big (I won't say "bloated"), and are paying through the nose for support already.
If you're looking at commodity servers and supporting them yourself, you're probably not going to look at IBM; their customers are going to be choosing between IBM pSeries, and maybe Sun's high-end SPARC gear, or maybe HP 9000 series stuff. They're probably migrating up from superminis with atrocious support costs anyway (and they may only be migrating because their superminis are being EOLed -- I've run into lots of organizations who were perfectly okay paying the support for their legacy gear, until it was no longer supported), so a $100k IBM system could easily look like a savings over 5 years when you consolidate a dozen "small iron" Unix boxes onto it.
I'm not exactly sure how they would find a cost savings if you were already just using cheap x86 servers, though. I guess they'd probably say 'consolidation,' but I don't know exactly how many commodity pizza-boxes you'd need to consolidate to pay for the TCO on a pSeries... I guarantee though if you called an IBM sales rep, they'd be able to make the numbers work, somehow.
IBM's own page on "Why Linux on the POWER?" is fairly interesting: I think they're going for PHB appeal here. The idea is that you have one machine, one support contract, to one company, and that's the end of that. (In theory.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is not an IBM technology, but instead is based on a technology developed by Transitive.
It would be much more useful if IBM would offer the version of Transitive software which allows POWER applications to run on x86 systems, rather than the reverse. The only thing which makes sense to run on a emulator on a IBM POWER system would be a mainframe environment.
Why emulate the most mass-produced CPU instruction set ever, given the ISA is still in mass production? Why emulate the cheap volume processor on a more expensive, proprietary platform? The reverse makes much more sense. The more expensive, more closed architecture should be emulated on the less expensive, more open platform.
I fail to understand what value running x86 Linux apps on POWER provides. Intel Woodcrest and AMD Opteron provide great 64-bit performance, the AMD/Intel competition keeps prices dirt cheap and innovation moving at light-speed, and VMware provides fine-grained virtualization. And just like the AMD/Intel war keeps processor prices low, the coming Xen/VMware war is going to cut the cost of virtualization.
Emulators are needed to support customers on processor architectures which are dead. That is Alpha and PA-RISC. Next would be current platforms which customers want to move off of. That would be the Mainframe first, then Itanium, and after that perhaps SPARC and POWER.
There are clearly some weird politics going on at Transitive.
HP's partnership with Transitive is not focused on taking care of HP's own Alpha and PA-RISC customers, but instead on offering a SPARC on Itanium emulator. HP does have a partnership with a mainframe emulator, which makes some sense, but why not offer consolidated hosting to your own existing customers first?
IBM's partnership with Transitive is not focused on POWER or mainframe customers, but instead on offering an x86 on POWER emulator.
I can never envision the business case for emulating the industry-standard x86 architecture on a proprietary RISC platform like IBM's POWER.
I would love to see VMware buy Transitive and offer the ability to create Alpha, PA-RISC, Mainframe, Itanium, POWER, and SPARC VMs on ESX server. Of course if they did that, it would be EMC declaring war on the rest of the IT industry, but it would be a really cool product.