When will OpenPOWER OpenBSD be now? Now.


We were delighted by the tease that OpenBSD is moving to OpenPOWER (although it is officially big-endian powerpc64, it requires OPAL, so a POWER8 is minimally required). Well, now you can try it out: a powerpc64 snapshot is now available with most of the standard binary distribution sets. The installation documentation is pretty much copy-pasta — I doubt very much that 64-bit PowerPC is supported on AMD Opteron, and I would be impressed to learn that the Pinebook Pro is OpenPOWER — but you should be able to boot from the miniroot (flash it to a USB drive using dd bs=1m) and manually setup and copy the file sets over. Curiously, the X11 distribution sets do not appear to be built yet, so you may be restricted to a text boot and/or the serial console. When I get my spare Talos II back up and running I intend to give this a full shakedown, since this would be a great basis for finally having NetBSD on OpenPOWER (my personal BSD of choice). The fact it doesn't right now is a great shame to an OS that is supposed to run everywhere but doesn't on one of the most open platforms anywhere.

Comments

  1. OpenBSD team did fantastic job on this (kettenis/drahn and others), but I'd like to correct you a bit since POWER8 is probably unsupported due to missing interrupt controller support IMHO. So far POWER9 only. IMHO!

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  2. It would be nice to hear about power10, is raptor working for new version of talos, do they have plans to make laptop witch power9 or power10?

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