FreeBSD 14.3 available on bare metal Raptor Talos II

[TimKelly]

Hi Everyone,
Raptor and I have collaborated on establishing a bare metal development environment for FreeBSD, currently at 14.3:

$ uname -a
FreeBSD FreeBSD_LE 14.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE releng/14.3-n271432-8c9ce319fef7 GENERIC powerpc
$ lscpu
Architecture:            powerpc64le
Byte Order:              Little Endian
Total CPU(s):            32
Model name:              IBM POWER9

We are supporting little-endian FreeBSD.  This is provided and hosted by Raptor (thanks!!!).   The details of the installation (for big-endian FreeBSD) are available at

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Installing_Big-endian_FreeBSD

but the implementation is transparent.   I also added a couple new wiki entries over at the

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Main_Page

on installing Bigendian FreeBSD on a QEMU VM, if you want to try that, as well as profiling SMT performance on Debian on bare metal.

If you are interested in developing within the FreeBSD development environment or porting software to Raptor machines on bare metal FreeBSD, please let me know.  In particular, the PMCs are not being handled properly and the power usage monitoring doesn't even exist.  This prevented me from doing a full apples-to-apples comparison against Debian, as the two OSes handle SMT very differently.  Please note this is not an endorsement  of FreeBSD, nor am I a FreeBSD developer or associated with them.

tim

[DKnoto]

I am using FreeBSD 15.x big-endian in a virtual machine (qemu). ZFS works fine for me. Basically, most things work except for graphics. DRM does not work.

[TimKelly]

I did early testing on bare metal using big-endian FreeBSD, but ultimately I decided to install little-endian on the machine to align with Raptor's internal development (they pointed out that the PCI bus is little-endian, as well).  There is a lot that is transparent to the bi-endian POWER9 CPU.  I successfully ran handrolled big-endian Altivec code both on bare metal FreeBSD as well as within a QEMU VM running on little-endian Debian (it failed on bare metal little-endian Debian, of course).

I did not try graphics; I only need the computational power.  However, it would be good to have that option.