FreeBSD on OPENPOWER

[Mark Millard]

On 2017-Jun-10, at 10:15 AM, PeerCorps Trust Fund <ipc at peercorpstrust.org> wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> Happy to hear this. Out of curiosity what exactly is needed for the FreeBSD bring up?

There is an old (2015-Jan-31) page:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/POWER8

I expect things have progressed since then. An old 2015-May status
report was ( https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-May/001637.html ):

> FreeBSD on POWER8
> 
>    URL: 
> http://www.tyan.com/campaign/openpower/
> 
> 
>    Contact: Nathan Whitehorn <
> nwhitehorn at freebsd.org
> >
>    Contact: Justin Hibbits <
> jhibbits at freebsd.org
> >
>    Contact: Adrian Chadd <
> adrian at freebsd.org
> >
> 
>    IBM and the OpenPOWER Foundation are pushing for a wider software and
>    hardware ecosystem for POWER8-based systems. Starting in January 2014,
>    we have been doing bringup work on a Tyan GN70-BP010 POWER8 server, a
>    quad-core 3 GHz system with a total of 32 hardware threads.
> 
>    Updates since the previous report:
>      * FreeBSD now boots under a hypervisor with the virtual SCSI block
>        device; the issue previously preventing this has been fixed.
>      * The powerpc64 pmap code was rewritten to be more scalable, as the
>        previous pmap code did not scale beyond a small number of CPUs.
>      * Initial support for IBM's Vector-Scalar Extensions (VSX) was added.
>      * The FreeBSD kernel was made completely position independent for
>        powerpc64, and later powerpc32 as well.
> 
>    This project is sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.
> 
> Open tasks:
> 
>     1. Get FreeBSD booting natively, rather than under KVM. This requires
>        writing OPAL drivers for the various hardware devices in the
>        system.
>     2. Integrate loader(8) with petitboot.

http://adrianchadd.blogspot.de/2015/02/freebsd-on-power8-its-alive.html says,
in part:

> Fast forward a few weeks - he's figured out the KVM issues, their lack of support for some mandated hypervisor APIs and other bugs - FreeBSD now boots inside of the hypervisor environment and seems stable enough to do development on.
> 
> He then found the existing powerpc pmap (physical memory management) code wasn't very SMP friendly - it works fine on one and two CPU powerpc machines, but this POWER8 evaluation board is a 4-core, 32-thread CPU. So a few days of development went by and he rewrote most of the pmap code to be much more fine grained locked and scale much, much better than the existing code. (He also found the PS3 hypervisor layer isn't thread-safe.)
> 
> What's been done thus far?
> 
> 	• FreeBSD boots inside the hypervisor environment;
> 	• Virtualised console, networking and storage all work;
> 	• (in progress) new, scalable pmap implementation;
> 	• Initial support for the Vector-Scalar Extension (VSX) that's found on POWER7 and POWER8.
> So, I'm impressed. Nathan's done a fantastic job bringing the whole thing up. There's some further work on the new powerpc technology that needs doing (things like the new vector processing units, performance counter support and such) and I'm sure Justin and Nathan will poke powerpc dtrace support into further good shape. I'm going to see if we can fix a chelsio 40G NIC into one of these and work with their developers to fix any endian/busdma issues that creep up, and then do some network stack scaling testing with it. There's also the missing hardware/hypervisor support to run FreeBSD on the bare metal, which would be a fantastic achievement.


A 2016-Mar note ( https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ppc/2016-March/008113.html )
was:

> We boot multiuser without problems in the simulator. There are some 
> remaining issues involving the bootloader that need to be resolved for 
> real hardware.
> -Nathan

There was: http://freebsd-bugs.freebsd.narkive.com/xZOoCt9C/bug-210106-current-won-t-boot-on-ppc64-power8-under-ibm-kvm
about "[Bug 210106] Current won't boot on PPC64 Power8 under IBM KVM"
and its fix. I'll note list the material here.

I'll stop searching with that. I do not know
current details. I've never had access to such
hardware.



> On 06/10/2017 07:16 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>> I am interested in it commercially.  I am attempting to work with IBM to
>> fund SemiHalf to do most of the bring up but don't have any definitive
>> answer as to whether this will actually happen yet.  If you have a
>> commercial use case, I would recommend bubbling it up through your sales
>> channel.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 8:29 AM, PeerCorps Trust Fund <
>> ipc at peercorpstrust.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Is there a document or other reference material concerning the status
>>> (intended or otherwise) of FreeBSD on OpenPower 8/9? Are there others
>>> interested in this?
>>> 
>>> Mike

===
Mark Millard
markmi at dsl-only.net