This ability is provided as a technical preview only. The ability to run Ubuntu directly on the POWER8 Linux-only system is provided as-is, is not a supported configuration option at this time, and therefore, is not for production use.

In practice, OPAL firmware enables a Linux operating system to run directly on the system, and running KVM in that operating system is not a requirement. In the scenario described here in this article, there is no KVM hosting, and the Ubuntu 14.04 operating system is running as an operating system directly on the system.īecause the OPAL firmware enables the PowerKVM mode, the terminology used in selecting the firmware below is targeted at that mode. By running directly on the system, this enables the operating system to be a KVM host, creating and controlling KVM Guests. The OPAL firmware referenced below is designed to allow a Linux operating system to run directly on the POWER8 system. Note: If you are running Ubuntu 14.04 non-virtualized, you need to upgrade the kernel packages to get cpufreq support. Over time, this capability is available in the open-source communities, so new versions of other Linux distros are expected to be enabled for this support as well. There is no PowerVM LPAR layer, and there is no PowerKVM hosting layer. It is also possible to run Ubuntu 14.04 directly on these systems, which the development teams refer to as non-virtualized mode, or 'bare-metal'.

Ubuntu 14.04 is generally available today and fully supported as a PowerKVM guest on the IBM Power Systems shown below:įor more details on Ubuntu 14.04 - see Canonical's What’s new in 14.04 LTS document. We show how Ubuntu can be installed directly on the OPAL firmware, and run as a single-image operating system directly on the system.

This technical preview tutorial explains how users of IBM's latest POWER8-based scale-out Linux servers can try Ubuntu running non-virtualized.

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