Alexandre Caldeira from IBM writes that CentOS is now available for the POWER8 platform. This is a big step for the OpenPOWER community, as the business world uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its twin CentOS for their servers.
CentOS (from the CentOS Project) is available for POWER8 with both Big Endian and Little Endian support! Starting with version 7 (1511), it can be downloaded from CentOS.org website and installed on POWER8 servers. With the entire version ported to IBM POWER, all the tools and packages you are used to are available right away. While keeping the same look-and-feel and commands, it leverages the IBM Power Systems platform to provide extreme performance, higher levels of availability and increased flexibility.
CentOS joins Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Suse on the Linux distributions that can be installed on IBM Power Systems, expanding the support for open source operating systems.
“One example of the powerful combination of the IBM POWER8 and the open source ecosystem, is the benchmark provided by MariaDB delivering more than 1 million queries per second by leveraging the IBM POWER processor and the open source hypervisor KVM.”
