Re: What's the plan for powerpc64 in FreeBSD 16

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Calvin Buckley" <[email protected]>
> To: "Al" <[email protected]>
> Cc: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <[email protected]>, "Minsoo Choo" <[email protected]>, "Warner Losh" <[email protected]>,
> "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "freebsd-ppc" <[email protected]>
> Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2025 8:54:20 AM
> Subject: Re: What's the plan for powerpc64 in FreeBSD 16

> On Nov 26, 2025, at 4:47 PM, Al <[email protected]> wrote:
>> There is a number of new PowerPC 64 BE systems:
>> A1222
>> Sam460 several versions
>> Mirari (New PPC hardware)
>> Also, https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/
>> I am also told you can still buy X5000s new.
> 
> IBM systems are also right there, but they seem invisible to the PowerPC
> enthusiasts. They don't have weird anemic embedded processors either.
> 
> I do have an IBM POWER8 system I'd like to use, but FreeBSD seems broken
> in PowerVM, so I haven't been able to try it yet. (Allegedly, it works
> with OPAL/OpenPOWER mode, but you lose partitioning, and I'm not using a
> whole system just for FreeBSD.)

Out of curiosity, since we don't use PowerVM here, does it expose pSeries guest interfaces or something else entirely?

One of the items on our plate here at Raptor is trying to deal with the less than ideal legacy virtualization interfaces, more specifically to try to standardize OPAL for this task, so if there is yet another incompatible implementation floating around that's useful for us to know.

I do know FreeBSD works under pSeries emulation via QEMU, but whether it works in nested mode as a second level guest is untested on this end.