Can Red Hat Version 5 exploit POWER7?
No, RHEL Version 5 will not “exploit” Power7. RHEL 5.4 is technically not supported by Red Hat on POWER7, but has been observed to “run just fine” for normal Power6 compatibility work. RHEL 5.5 is officially supported, but runs in “Compatibility mode” and will appear as a POWER6 system. The kernel in RHEL 5.5 does not have the enabling needed for POWER7 exploitation (in particular – that means SMT=4 and VSX support). Bottom line – RHEL 5 will run on a POWER7 system, but will not fully exploit the POWER7 system. RHEL 5, with the older kernel, is not expected to ever fully exploit POWER7. Looking forward, and recognizing that RHEL 6 is now in public beta mode, it is reasonable to expect that POWER7 support is included in the 2.6.32 kernel which is included with RHEL 6. For RHEL 5 users, they might consider downloading, building, and booting a 2.6.32 mainline kernel which enables the POWER7 support. See the next section for more details. Since this mode is not officially supported, we don
