IBM System storage DS6000 Series, Attachment Manual

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feedback and further development by programmers. Linux developers are
encouraged to design their own specialized distribution of the operating system to
meet their specific needs.
All Linux distributions share a similar Linux kernel and development library. Linux
distributors provide custom components that ease the installation and maintenance
of Linux systems. Before you install another distributor’s version of Linux, verify that
the kernel has been compiled for the Power PC and the hardware for the i5 server.
Your system might be misconfigured and will not run Linux in a guest partition.
You can download different versions of Linux through the Internet. However, not all
the versions of Linux have been tested for use with the storage unit. Please see
your Linux distributor for information regarding how to obtain the latest maintenance
updates.
iSeries I/O adapters (IOAs) supported by Linux
You can assign IOAs to a guest partition. See
publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/v5r2/ic2924/index.htm for a list of adapters that the i5
server supports in a guest partition running Linux.
Managing Linux in a guest partition
The following sections provide the information that you need to manage Linux in a
guest partition.
Virtual I/O in a guest partition running Linux
Virtual I/O resources are devices that are owned by the hosting i5/OS partition. The
i5 Linux kernel and i5/OS support several different kinds of virtual I/O resources.
They are virtual console, virtual disk unit, virtual CD, virtual tape, and virtual
Ethernet.
Virtual console provides console function for the guest partition through an i5/OS
partition. The virtual console can be established to the hosting partition or to the
primary partition. The use of the virtual console allows the installation program to
communicate with the user prior to networking resources that you configure. You
can use the virtual console to troubleshoot system errors.
When you use virtual disk for a Linux partition, the i5/OS partitions control
connectivity to the real disk storage. The i5/OS hosting partition and its operating
system versions control the storage unit connectivity solely in this configuration. For
more information about i5/OS connectivity to the storage unit, see
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds6000.
A hosting partition can only provide virtual disk unit. Virtual DASD provides access
to NWSSTG virtual disks from Linux. By default, the CRTNWSSTG command
creates a disk environment with one disk partition that is formatted with the FAT16
file system. The Linux installation program will reformat the disk for Linux, or you
can use Linux commands such as fdisk and mke2fs to format the disk for Linux.
For more detailed information about how your company might use a guest partition
with I/O resources go to http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/v5r2/ic2924/index.htm.
Chapter 7. Attaching to an IBM iSeries host
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