New Features in POWER6 and AIX6 and How to Get Started
This Wiki page is based on an early POWER6 and AIX6 experience -Your mileage may vary.
This is for technical people - typically System Administrators but some sections (DFP, Probevue and Storage Keys) assume you are an C programmer/designer or can at least read a little C code or you want to understand the basics of these subjects and how they can help you.
Hands-On Technical Demo Movies
These Movies have been moved to their own Wiki page at http://www-941.ibm.com/collaboration/wiki/display/WikiPtype/Movies
AIX6 Workload Partitions (WPAR) and Application Workload Mobility
Workload Partitions (WPAR) feature that is standard with AIX 6, allow you to run many "mini" copies of AIX within a global copy of AIX with reduced overheads and this can drastically cut down the number of copies of AIX - which means reduced system administrator time. In addition, it means reduced the use of disk and memory and shared use of processors, which saves money. All this in a security (each WPAR can have its own root user) and safe environment. If this was not enough the Mobility feature allows the administrator to jump a live running WPAR from one global AIX to another on a different machine with only a few seconds outage. This can be used to balance worjloads across a set of machines or to empty a machine for maintenance or upgrading time.
Here are the notes I wrote while learning WPARs and the Workload Partition Manager. I hope they are useful to get you started - WPAR features.
POWER6 Decimal Floating Point - numbers with up to 34 digit accuracy
The POWER6 CPU is to heart of the next range on System p machines. Not only a superbly fast processor at 4.7 GHz but this CPU allows for some industry leading new features. This includes Decimal Floating Point and new raw data type within the CPU (like the current characters, integers and floating point numbers) but with high numbers of digits accuracy which means they can be used for money calculations. Most current applications and databases have to use Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) to perform calculations with money to sufficient accuracy and this is very heavy work on the processor - it is like doing long division with a pencil rather than a calculator. Decimal Floating point is here to fix this and speed up most application by getting the processor to do the hard work with up to 34 digit accuracy.
Take this link to find out more of what it means and how to make use of these Decimal Floating Point features.
AIX 6 ProbeVue a new way to investigate and debug live applications
AIX has included its Trace feature since 1990
- Pre-built in hooks (code) in the AIX kernel and these mostly capture the stat and parameters of kernel functions
- Designed for production use but be careful it collects so much information it can slow the performance
AIX 6 ProbeVue - in the current Open Beta version
- Dynamically added when needed for user code too
- Zero code modifications
- Once enabled they trigger actions in C "like" language = Vue
- Designed for production use but very little effect on performance
- Don't dump every thing
- Use script to identify what you really need or find error conditions
Take this link to find out more of what it means and how to make use of the Probevue command.
POWER6 Storage Keys to protect your memory from programming errors
Old problem: Applications or even the operating System code is made of many modules and stray pointers can easily corrupting memory. Much worse the corruption is not spotted till much later and then it is impossible to work out who did what, why or when? Can take weeks to solve but now we have Storage Keys. Be careful here - this is a memory protection scheme and not related to disk storage (the kernel guru's think of memory as storage as they use load and store instructions).
Take this link to find out more of what it means and how to make use of user memory protection keys as a programmer: StorageKeys.
