There is not VIO style thing in Linux (VIO exists because VIO is a product designed using dedicated proprietary HW+SW). So, Linux is an operating system like AIX (though you could have multiple VMs running through the KVM module) and you can do hardware inspection with some utilities like:
- lspci
- lsusb
- hwinfo
- dmidecode
- lshw
The tools that might be there for hardware querying can vary. See also:
NTLUG | Articles / ExploringHardware
If your Linux is running VMs, you can do: virsh list to see them and do a man on virsh to get more commands you can do to query the virtual environments.
(I may not have been too clear, the reason you usually have VIO is so you can break the IBM host into multiple LPARs, which is why I sort of likened it to running VMs inside of Linux... but they are very different things)