Actually, POWER9 is bi-endian and can switch between BE and LE at runtime. BE
actually has a very slight performance advantage in some cases. Linux is the
only OS that appears to be doing much LE stuff on POWER, other OS development
that I'm aware of is all BE focused.
I know that Timothy Pearson at Raptor Engineering has an open offer to provide
remote access to POWER9 systems for the purposes of OS porting, if access to a
machine is the problem.
Peter, I'm sure that he'd give you access to one if you wanted.
Also, for anyone interested in POWER who has already looked at the Talos II
when it first came out and didn't get it because of the price -- it might be
worth another look, there's a Lite variant available now at a lower cost than
the original Talos II, as well as a limited number of "Special Developer
Systems" ( https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS1/intro.html ) that are
being sold complete for US$1600, intended as a way for kernel / software
developers to get a box for doing kernel dev / compiling cheaply. (They have an
older stepping of the processor that doesn't support virtualization and
spectre/meltdown mitigation, but any Sforza Power9 processor can be dropped in
later)
I grabbed one of those myself when they first went on sale and it will be
arriving tomorrow. I'll be able to test stuff and maybe do some debugging on my
end.
(I don't work for Raptor Engineering, but I own two of their machines now and
am thoroughly enjoying the hardware, and am very enthusiastic about POWER9 in
general.)
Regarding Pascal's offer in the OP, the 9006-22P is also an OpenBMC based
machine (as opposed to a FSP based machine, so it and the Talos II should be
nearly identical in how they appear to the OS, so any work on OPAL bits will
work for both at the same time.
On Tue, Jul 24, 2018, at 2:21 PM, Peter J. Philipp wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm working on a powerpc64 port, I've been at it 2 weeks non-stop. I
> don't know if I'll finish. But I gotta say hey! this is a generous offer.
>
> Since I'm focusing on the big endian machine byte order and on PowerPC
> 970's it would need to be ported again to little endian afaik. If it's
> possible to run on a Power9 in big endian mode this would be cool.
>
> I believe I am not worthy of such a machine and only worthy if I port
> OpenBSD to my PowerPC 970FX cpu. Let's take our time and wait to see if
> I or anyone else moves in a positive direction in this area.
>
> BTW I've been working on a cross-compiler to powerpc64 today. I used
> kevlo's riscv cross compiler port and modified it. Unfortunately I
> started before sunrise and it's sunset now and i haven't managed to get
> cross-gcc working. I may succeed tomorrow.
>
> Regards,
>
> -peter
>
>
> On 07/24/18 20:27, Pascal de Kloe wrote:
> > I'm offering my brand new IBM 9006-22P with two 16-core 2.9GHZ CPUs to
> > the OpenBSD project for free. Who can make the hardware port happen?
> > Serious attempts only.
>
--
Brandon Bergren
Technical Generalist
