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 supports the following virtual I/O resources: 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.

A hosting partition can only provide a 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 reformats the disk for Linux, or you can use Linux commands such as fdisk and mke2fs to format the disk for Linux.

Notes:

For more information about i5/OS connectivity to the storage unit, see http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds6000
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/.

Directly attached I/O in a guest partition running Linux

With directly attached I/O, Linux manages the hardware resources and all I/O resources. You can allocate disk units, tape devices, optical devices, and LAN adapters to a guest partition running Linux.

You must have an NWSD to install Linux in a guest partition. After you install Linux, you can configure the partition to start independently.

For directly attached hardware, all failure and diagnostic messages are displayed within the guest partition.

Connectivity to the storage unit from i5 Linux is managed solely through fibre-channel adapters. For more information about the adapters and the Linux device, see http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/linux/fibre_channel.html.