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This page describes running FreeBSD on OpenPOWER POWER8 systems, such as the Tyan GN70-BP010.
as of 20190219 some changes to enhance stability have been committed. If you have previously had problems with POWER8, try -CURRENT.
There are two ways to run these machines. FreeBSD targets both.
PowerKVM
PowerKVM is the more mature of the two since it provides a firmware and hypervisor interface matching previous POWER systems. It is available on all supported FreeBSD releases.
The following incantations are sufficient to bring up FreeBSD on an Ubuntu 14.10 host:
root@ubuntu:~# ppc64_cpu --smt=off root@ubuntu:~# modprobe -a kvm-hv root@ubuntu:~# echo 100 > /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages root@ubuntu:~# mkdir /dev/hugepages root@ubuntu:~# mount -t hugetlbfs huge /dev/hugepages root@ubuntu:~# qemu-system-ppc64 -enable-kvm -m 1536 -nographic -vga none -cdrom FreeBSD.iso -mem-prealloc -mem-path /dev/hugepages -smp cores=3 threads=8
Bare Metal
PowerNV support has been merged to HEAD and is accessible 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