www_powerel_org/content/about.md

---
title: "About"
date: 2018-06-24
draft: false
---

## History ##

PowerEL stands for Power Enterprise Linux, it originates from a requirement to have a fully free open source distribution for the IBM POWER platform.  
The distribution takes it's origin from Enterprise Linux from Red Hat, CentOS, Oracle Linux, and some Fedora and SuSE features.  
While currently CentOS is available on for Power8, it doesn't have an optimized version and it follows it's upstream, RHEL, for all features, wich are limited.  
PowerEL wants to make this process easier and more convenient providing more packages out of the box.  
In making PowerEL more usable, an Intel CPU optimized version is also available.  

PowerEL uses the distro tag __pel__ and uses the same ABI as the rhel based systems, so you can use existing binaries on PowerEL.  
PowerEL is a optimized version with specific cpu architecture optimzed compiled packages, so it only works on cpu's with at least this set of features available.  


## Architectures ##

PowerEL supports specific CPU architectures with specific feature requirements.

- IBM Power8 (or higher) - Big Endian : __ppc64__
- IBM Power8 (or higher) - Little Endian : __ppc64le__
- Intel Xeon/i9/i7/i5/i3 with AVX support (or higher) : __x86_64__


## Credits ##

Here are some credits of people who inspired, assisted and helped the project.

- Trilands bvba Antwerpen
- Franz Bourlet (IBM Belgium)
- Rudy Roelandt (IBM Belgium)
- Robert Keersse (Don Bosco Leren en Werken Wilrijk)

And many other people at IBM.