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OpenPOWER Host OS

The OpenPOWER Host OS is an open source project that consists of a set of software components, including the Linux kernel and KVM virtualization technologies such as QEMU, with added code to provide support for OpenPOWER hardware.

The project provides the core components and a simple build framework that allows the packaging and installation atop a traditional GNU/Linux distribution with the intent of facilitating development/experimentation with POWER.

What’s new

Explore our latest release.

Here are its highlights:

Components

Host OS delivers a packaged version of a set of open source projects, installable over a GNU/Linux distribution. The list of Host OS components is (without dependencies):

kernel
qemu
libvirt
ppc64-diag
libvpd
lsvpd
libservicelog
servicelog
SLOF

Versioning

The project as a whole has an independent versioning not tied to the schedules of individual components.

Development versions are periodically built and validated via a test suite. The latest tested tag is 3.5-dev-2018-08-06. The full list of development tags is here. For released tags, look here.

About every 6 months a tag containing a more significant set of features is promoted to stable. The current stable tag is 3.0-2017-09-22.

Getting Started

The Quick Start guide explains how you can create packages ready for installation on CentOS and optionally a bootable Host OS ISO file.

Host OS components are packaged by a build script that reads from a git repository containing packages metadata. You are encouraged to build your own version and experiment with the various components and their features.

Going further

During your exploration time with POWER and Host OS, feel free to ask questions, raise issues, contribute code and interact with the packages maintainers.

One way to share your ideas, specially when regarding single Host OS components, is via the “Issues” page at the component’s GitHub repository.

For those wishing to continuously develop and build packages on top of Host OS, the tests and infrastructure repositories will be of use in reproducing the build system and test infrastructure.

Contact us via:

IRC: #hostos @freenode
email: open-power-host-os@mailinglist.openpowerfoundation.org (subscription link)


Other references:
1- https://developer.ibm.com/open/openprojects/openpower-host-os/