IBM POWER6 and FreeBSD

[Nathan Whitehorn]

Dmitriy Demidov wrote:
> Hi list!
> 
> I got one IBM Power 550 system to play with =)
> http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/550/index.html
> 
> First of all, I make a try to start FreeBSD-CURRENT snapshot installation, 
> but - without success. System (SMS) do not recognizes FreeBSD-ppc nstallation 
> media as bootable. The same with 7.1-RELEASE... I can start Linux SLES 10 
> installation on this machine - so looks like DVD-ROM is not a problem here.
> 
> I take a look at http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html but do not found 
> information about IBM POWER architecture support, so may be my idea to boot 
> FreeBSD on this system is toooo crazy? :)
> 
> At this moment system is not partitioned - it do not have PowerVM 
> virtualization enabled. 
> 
> So, I would like to ask - is it possible to start FreeBSD here or not? May be 
> NetBSD will works on this POWER6 system? 
> 
> It is not critical for me - I'm just playing with this system while I have 
> physical access - it is not intendet to be production.

How long do you have this machine for? I'm in the middle of adding 
support for systems like this in Perforce, but it is still a little raw. 
  Depending on whether the machine supports the 64-bit bridge mode 
facility, the kernel may at least begin to boot now, but I can't locate 
a manual for the POWER6 to check.
-Nathan