Tuesday 12 April 2011

IBM WebSphere Application Server support on POWER7 hardware

I have just had a fun few days istalling WebSphere process server on a client site. They were installing this on Power7 hardware which caused us an issue. Simply trying to run any install commands on Process server 6.1 caused a java core and a snap dump and output similar to this:

Unhandled exception Type=Segmentation error vmState=0x00000000 J9Generic_Signal_Number=00000004 Signal_Number=0000000b Error_Value=00000000 Signal_Code=00000033 Handler1=09001000A03A89F0 Handler2=09001000A0574DB8 R0=09000000014F1FE8 R1=0FFFFFFFFFFFE4E0 R2=07000000002DBE30 R3=000000000000000B R4=0000000000000000 R5=09000000014F1FE8 R6=000000011191E673 R7=000000011191E668 R8=000000011191E670 R9=0000000037CE0000 R10=000000011181BB70 R11=0900000001507F50 R12=090000000140B90C R13=000000011000EB20 R14=000000011191E658 R15=00000001104E4800 R16=0000000110D7B230 R17=00000001118199F8 R18=09001000A03AC2C8 R19=0000000000000021 R20=0000000111819AB8 R21=000000011191E690 R22=0700000000447E70 R23=0700000000447EA0 R24=0700000000448100 R25=0000000112067450 R26=07000000002D8188 R27=07000000002D8878 R28=0000000000000000 R29=0000000000000001 R30=07000000002D8A68 R31=07000000002DBE30 IAR=0900000001507F50 LR=00000001105A4EE0 MSR=A00000000000D032 CTR=0900000001507F50 CR=4254543420000004 FPSCR=8200000000000000 XER=2000000482000000 FPR0 0000001800000018 (f: 24.000000, d: 5.092790e-313)

It turns out it wasn't the WPS install but the underlying WAS java version that was causing the issue. The quick and easy way around this was to set:

export JAVA_COMPILER=NONE for the user that was running the install.

This link gives more details of supported versions of WebSphere on Power 7 kit http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21422150