PowerKVM is the more mature of the two since it provides a firmware and hypervisor interface matching previous POWER systems. Due to a bug in the IOMMU support, 10.1 will not work on these systems. 11-CURRENT snapshots after Jan. 26 2015 should, however. 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

Work is ongoing on the projects/powernv branch. Console IO and interfaces to the OPAL firmware are complete.

• Console output on hardware
• Boots multiuser on simulator with OPAL
• Untested draft PCI driver

• powerpc pmap improvements for SMP (nathanw) - in user/nwhitehorn/ppc64-pmap-rework

To do:

• Make kboot loader support relocatable kernels
• Add OPAL and RTAS to FDT reserved map
• PCI IOMMU support
• petitboot boot1
• patches to petitboot to recognize FreeBSD media