I am looking to purchase an IBM iSeries 9406-520, and would like to run Linux on it without using OS/400. My understanding is that bare metal Linux is not possible on the iSeries (i.e. OS/400 must be installed), but this is not true for the p series 520. Is there a way to change the "personality" of the 520 so that bare metal Linux is supported?
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The hardware of i and p is the same, parts of the firmware are not. So, the precise answer to your question is "No". At least not without disassembling the firmware. :-) Plus, i approved disks utilize 522 Bytes sector size, additional SCSI commands and probably more. The Linux block layer on x86 plainly refuses to work with these disks and I'm positive that the block layer on PPC isn't different. You can replace the i disks with 512 Byte disks, though.
A good way to go would be to get a 520 with an unlimited PowerVM license built in(to firmware). You can then load VIOS (a Bare Metal Hypervisor) onto the machine and create software based LPARs (aka: VMs) to your liking. I don't know much more details, though. On my way to learn, I opted for IBM i as sole OS, with Linux as guest LPAR, somewhen in the future. This renders the PowerVM feature needless, though.
VIOS probably helps with sector size issues. If you load IBM i into a VIOS LPAR, you can utilize plain 512 Byte disks. So I guess the other way 'round is true, also.
A word on Linux: Charles is partly right. Aside from RedHat and SuSe with commercial support (aka: Paid access to security updates), there's Canonical with freely downloadable images of Ubuntu Server, Debian and probably more.
You need to select your distro flavor according to the CPUs in the box, because of byte ordering issues. PPC supports big endian (PPC64) and little endian (PPC64el) in general. Seems that this isn't true for all CPU opcodes. The first POWER with full little endian support is POWER8. Sadly, Debian dropped big endian support a while ago. I'm not sure of Ubuntu. Probably, a 32-Bit-Distro (PPC, for older Macintoshes) would work, with accompanying memory constraints, though. My 520 has POWER6+ CPUs but I did not take time to experiment with Linux on this platform yet.
PoC
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I don't believe you can...
Even if you could, you couldn't load just any distro. Only Redhat's Enterprise (or possibly SUSE Enterprise) distros, which you have to pay for.
Charles
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The IBM support center page on the 9406-520 has links for installing AIX or Linux. The Linux page doesn't have much information on it, but it would seem that a Power i5 Linux should be loadable. You may be able to get more information from IBM.
mpez0
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