Re: FreeBSD on PowerVM LPARs (powerpc64le) — LibrePower PoC

On Aug 17, 2026, at 8:23 AM, LibrePower <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi Adrian, Justin,
> Thank you very much for your prompt feedback, and apologies for my late reply. 
> Everything is available here:
>     • https://librepower.org/platforms/freebsd/ — our public website, which lists what currently works out of the box. An OVA for PowerVS* is already available, along with two installer ISOs. The ISOs have only been booted under qemu so far; testing them on real POWER9/POWER10/POWER11 LPARs is next.
> note: it is an honour to share this here first, before announcing it. This community deserves nothing less :)
>     • https://gitlab.com/librepower/freebsd-powervm — the repository containing 21 patches against main at a257e2dc9c6e, arranged in application order, with one logical change per patch and the corresponding READMEs and changelog.
> 
> That said, this is still a work in progress. I am continuing to measure and validate it, so please treat the code and numbers as provisional: the overall shape of the work is more settled than some of the details. I am also rerunning the build checks against that exact base revision and will correct anything that does not pass.
> Please note that on PowerVS* the boot disk is exposed via virtual Fibre Channel, whose driver is maintained separately in the same repository. The published image already includes it.
> Rather than fill this email with the technical challenges you asked about, I have documented them here and will keep the page current:
> https://gitlab.com/librepower/freebsd-powervm/-/blob/main/docs/technical-summary.md
> 
> There are currently fourteen items, divided between issues that I believe should be fixed in FreeBSD and platform behaviours worth documenting before someone loses a day debugging what turns out to be byte order, interrupt handling, or RTAS behaviour.
> Regarding packages, I have been building a powerpc64le package set because none was available. It currently contains 168 packages, including Rust:
> https://librepower.org/freebsd/FreeBSD:15:powerpc64le/latest
> 
> Go also builds using the FreeBSD/ppc64le port maintained by Raptor Engineering, although I have not packaged it yet. If official ppc64le/ppc64 packages for 15 and 16 are something you want to get going, I would be glad to help with the legwork.
> Regarding upstreaming, I have no previous FreeBSD or Phabricator experience, so I would much rather follow your lead than make assumptions about the preferred process. Please let me know which parts you consider worth landing and in what order. I will then submit them as Differentials—or in whatever form creates the least work for you. I am in no hurry and would rather send three patches you want than an entire series you have to triage.
> @Javi, regarding endianness: big-endian would not have booted as-is either. FreeBSD’s pseries support was never validated against PHYP in either endianness, so a big-endian LPAR requires much the same work. Since the work had to be done either way, ppc64le makes more sense—it is what Linux on Power ships by default.
> I am happy to expand on any of this—or to be told that I have got the wrong end of the stick.

It should work on PowerVM/phyp in both LE/BE, but there's some bugs that prevent it from working[1]. If you fix one, the other one should also be fixed (and FWIW, P5/P6/P7 hardware is cheap used and BE only).

> Thank you again and best regards,
> Hugo

[1]: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=279137