The Linux Kernel Continues Prepping For POWER9 Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 31 July 2016 at 08:21 AM EDT. 15 Comments
HARDWARE
IBM continues prepping the Linux kernel for supporting the upcoming POWER9 processors.

IBM has been developing POWER9 and based on the Power ISA 3.0 while the first POWER9 processors aren't expected to market until 2017. Making POWER9 fairly exciting is also the incorporation of NVIDIA's NVLink technology into the platform. POWER9 CPUs are expected to be manufactured on a 14nm FinFET process, a step ahead from the 22nm POWER8.

We've seen IBM kernel developers laying the foundation of POWER9 support going back the past few kernel releases. With Linux 4.8, there's more POWER9 support.

New to POWER9 support on Linux 4.8 is POWER9 idle support, POWER9 PMU support, preliminary interrupt and PCI support, and various other POWER9 improvements.

Outside of the POWER9-specific work, the PowerPC pull request for Linux 4.8 also contains PowerNV PCI hot-plug support, eBPF JIT support for PPC64LE, CXL updates, boot code consolation, and various clean-ups and fixes. More details via the PR.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

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.

Popular News This Week