Announcement: PowerNV support in 12-CURRENT

[Wojciech Macek]

Hello,

I'm happy to announce that running FreeBSD on Power8 with PowerNV is now
possible since r330240.

Supported features
 * Basic architecture support
   * Memory Management Unit
   * Interrupts
   * System timers
   * OPAL console
 * SMP, up to 128 CPUs were tested
 * Multiuser environment
 * PCIe bus with IOMMU and full IO cache coherency
 * USB XHCI controller
 * Device drivers:
   * Chelsio cxgbe(4)
   * NVMe SSD
   * OPAL I2C and RTC drivers
   * Deep sleep modes for idle cores


At this point I'd like to send special thanks to all involved, especially:
 * Nathan Whitehorn, for providing initial support for the architecture,
 * Justin Hibbits and Nathan Whitehorn for help and insightful reviews,
 * Kevin Bowling (Limelight Networks) for organizing this project,
 * Sam Montoya (QCM Technologies) for sponsorhip and for a reference
hardware,
 * IBM team for help with debugging,
 * the whole Semihalf development team (Patryk Duda, Michal Stanek) and
Rafal Jaworowski for bringing the project to us,
 * and the rest of PPC ecosystems, users, testers and developers who
participated in various ways during the development process.

Best regards,
Wojciech Macek
wma@