Installing Windows XP on IBM Power (for fun)

Why not emulate other architectures on Power?

In a recent conversation with what I like to call the Wizards of Power – the technical leadership behind this amazing platform, including inventors, architects, distinguished engineers, and incredible teams – they asked me:

“Why are you interested in emulation? Who would want to emulate other architectures on Power, and what’s the point?”

My response was that, in the open-source world, many things we do are driven by curiosity or even just for fun. So… why not install Windows on IBM Power?

The curiosity as our engine

It resonates in my head that if one day I can have as much fun with Linux on ppc64le as I do on x86 or gradually on ARM (Mac, Raspberry), it will mean Power can be “the third” architecture for Linux far beyond real use cases and mission-critical workloads.

In other words, if I can do the same on ppc64le as on other architectures, I can use Power for any use case.

Why have thousands of x86 servers wasting energy and taking up space in the data center when we can have a few Power servers doing the same work more securely and efficiently?

Clients might say it’s for compatibility, for using standard tools. But multi-architecture could be the new standard, if it’s not already.

I don’t want to dive too deep into this today. Several ideas have been published on the IBM portal, and I believe the teams at IBM, Debian, Canonical, and Red Hat are doing an excellent job, which I will cover in future posts.

There have been news updates in the SIXE blog over the past months covering the hard work being done in this area, and with the release of the new FW1060 firmware level, we finally have full support for KVM on PowerVM. This is equivalent to what exists on IBM Z/Linux One. Great!

As always, I wanted to push technology to its limits, including an old dream: running Windows (the “enemy” for AIX and Linux folks), and in this case, running Windows XP on an IBM Power10, using KVM and QEMU.

Preparation

Setting up an LPAR to run Windows on IBM Power requires specific steps, such as assigning a dedicated processor. We need to configure the LPAR to be a KVM host, which will change how it uses PowerVM to avoid overhead. We also need to assign at least one dedicated processor (not in “donor” mode, mind you). This will give us 8 dedicated threads to run our virtual processors in KVM. Yes, it’s simpler and less capable than PowerVM with its micro-partitions, but it’s still an industry standard, and not everyone needs to fly to work. Don’t you think?

Choosing the Distribution

From my experience, the best support for experiments with ppc64le tends to be Debian or Fedora. In this case, I’ve installed Fedora 40 and updated it to the latest levels. Then, you need to install all the virtualization packages and the QEMU support for other architectures. Following my idea of creating interactive articles, I will use virt-manager to avoid complex QEMU configurations. In my environment, I’ve installed all the qemu-system-* packages.

For Windows to detect our SATA virtual disks as usable, you’ll need to configure this. Once that’s done, you can install what your disks will need:

dnf install virtio-win-stable

You’ll also need a Windows XP ISO and its license numbers. I recommend placing it in /var/lib/libvirtd/images so it can be automatically detected by virt-manager.

Creating the Virtual Machine (just follow the wizard)

Make sure to select x86 as the architecture (QEMU will handle this).

Just like when running AIX on x86, don’t expect it to be very fast, although it took me about an hour to install… pretty much the same time it would take on a PC back then.

I can’t wait to see MS Messenger again! Enjoy the video and stay updated by following us!

Other Tests

What do you think about running MS PowerShell for ARM64 in Docker? Now I can “dir” in Power, how cool! :P

Conclusion

The work done to support KVM is, for me, the biggest breakthrough in recent years because of the endless possibilities it opens up for the Power platform. The work to support KVM not only opens possibilities for Linux but also enables new ways to experiment with Windows on IBM Power, a powerful and innovative combination.