Thanks Jens, Nick, Christophe and Michael for your work so far. Apologies for the out of thread email.
Confirming MariabD-10.6+ is required( when we added liburing), and previous versions used libaio (which tested without incident as mpe retested). We were (we're now back on the old good kernel Jens indicated) getting failures like https://buildbot.mariadb.org/#/builders/231/builds/16857 in a container (of various distro userspaces) on bare metal. bare metal end of /proc/cpuinfo processor : 127 cpu : POWER9, altivec supported clock : 3283.000000MHz revision : 2.2 (pvr 004e 1202) timebase : 512000000 platform : PowerNV model : 9006-22P machine : PowerNV 9006-22P firmware : OPAL MMU : Radix