PowerNV

PowerNV (PowerNV): The IBM name (standing for Power Non-Virtualized) for POWER systems that conform to the OpenPOWER standard and expose OpenPOWER interfaces, such as OPAL, to the host operating system. This distinguishes OpenPOWER platforms from earlier systems using Open Firmware as well as from IBM's Scale Up (SU) offerings that focus on AIX and other proprietary software.

You can determine if you are on an OpenPOWER platform fairly easily via examination of the '/proc/cpuinfo' file on Linux systems. The platform field will show "PowerNV" and the "firmware" field will normally show "OPAL".

Known processors with PowerNV support include:

• POWER8
• POWER8E
• POWER9