Linux 5.3 for POWER, and ppc64le gets a Fedora Desktop
Power ISA-specific changes in this release are relatively few but still noteworthy. Besides support for LZMA and LZO-compressed uImages, there is now Power ISA support for HAVE_ARCH_HUGE_VMAP, which enables (as the name would suggest) huge virtual memory mappings. With additional code in a future kernel, this should facilitate upcoming performance improvements. There is also additional /proc support for getting statistics on how virtual CPUs are dispatched to physical cores by systems using the Power hypervisor.
Meanwhile, this won't make much difference to people like me who have been using Fedora for awhile, but if you want to experiment with other distros on your POWER9 system Fedora is working on Live and Workstation ISOs for ppc64le. Currently this is Rawhide only (which is what will become F32) and you can of course already install from Server and switch to the Workstation flavour, or install over the network. However, it's just another positive indicator that IBM's purchase of Red Hat will continue facilitating improvements in Linux in general and Fedora/RHEL support for OpenPOWER in particular, especially as the installed base of POWER9 workstations like our T2s and Blackbirds continues to grow in numbers. In fact, although we don't have statistics, it's still quite possible (counting box for box) that there are now more discrete POWER9 workstations in operation out there than there are servers.
I'm still waiting for 5.4 and its PCIe DMA compatibility module. That should make discrete GPUs a much more stable proposition.
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