IBM Open source Power8 chip microcode optimization Power server

"Tenkine Server channel July 17 News" IBM recently open source management Power8 chip boot sequence of microcode, which is very similar to the x86 platform BIOS. The open source firmware is a startup code that, in addition to some other uses, enables the processor to connect memory and peripherals together and set up the bootstrapper so that it can load the operating system after testing the components of the systems.

IBM has published 420000 lines of Power8 firmware code on behalf of the OpenPOWER Foundation, and the code can be downloaded from GitHub. The open source Power8 firmware code contains a opal,opal that is an abbreviation of the Open Power abstraction Layer (The Open Power Abstraction layer).

With OPAL,IBM, the Power8 boot order is more like the x86 boot sequence. In the x86 boot sequence, the BIOS is loaded into the x86 chip, and the Linux operating system can then interact directly with the chip. The point of Opal is that you can start the Power8 system directly into Linux, and then enter the KVM and OpenStack, and the x86 machine.

IBM has always installed virtual machine management monitoring layer on power machines, assuming that all commercial customers want to http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13999.html "> The workload is consolidated onto as few physical machines as possible, and IBM effectively absorbs the cost of virtualization if it is run by default and displays the performance of the machine while monitoring the runtime. So customers don't have to worry about that. However, IBM wants Power8 and later systems to be used in supercomputing and financial markets, in which case the heavyweight hypervisor is never available because it increases latency and consumes the CPU performance of the machine.

The flexibility of IBM power is enhanced by the introduction of OPAL,IBM Power8 to enable users to have more options. In this move, we see the blue giant trying to build an open power biosphere. Starting with POWER8, any enterprise with a technical capability can design and produce CPU chips based on the power architecture and can improve them.

IBM is open to POWER8 technology because it allows more vendors to participate in the power system, and before that, the power server stands for closure, which guarantees IBM's high profits, but it is difficult to form x86 as a broad ecosystem. With open source, IBM will undoubtedly enhance its competitive edge with Intel in the server market and build a new open source ecosystem on the server side.