Merge of projects/pseries branch

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 09/18/13 17:13, Joe Nosay wrote:
> What's the status of virtualization on Power(64) for FreeBSD?
> Did you test this out on your PS3?
> No hardware yet, but am hoping soon.
>

This stuff is designed to work on unvirtualized or paravirtualized POWER 
systems using the standard IBM hypervisor. Note that this is a different 
hypervisor than the one running on the PS3, although the same PV 
infrastructure is useful for both. In principle, the support matrix 
looks like this -- though bear in mind that this is theoretical and not 
actually tested in almost all cases:

CPU                    Bare Metal                LPAR (Under hypervisor)
<= POWER3    Yes (ppc32 only)                No
POWER4            Yes                            ppc64 only
970                    Yes                            ppc64 only
POWER5-6         No*                           ppc64 only
POWER7-8         No                             ppc64 only

* POWER5 and 6 systems run *only* under the hypervisor, no matter the 
operating system

QEMU's "pseries" target emulates a POWER7 LPAR. On POWER7 and up, as 
well as on non-Apple 970 and POWER4 systems, it is possible to run KVM 
on Linux that should just work with 10.0-ALPHA2 at native hardware speed.
-Nathan

> On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 9:19 AM, Nathan Whitehorn 
> <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org <mailto:nwhitehorn at freebsd.org>> wrote:
>
>     Yesterday, I merged projects/pseries into HEAD (r255643). To quote
>     the commit message:
>
>     Log:
>       Merge in support for PAPR-compliant (Power Architecture Platform
>       Requirements) systems from the projects/pseries branch. This in
>     principle
>       includes all IBM POWER hardware released in the last 15 years
>     with the
>       exception of POWER3-based systems when run in 64-bit mode. The main
>       development target, however, has been the PAPR logical partition
>     support
>       that is the default target in KVM on POWER and QEMU -- mileage
>     may vary
>       on actual hardware at present. Much of the heavy lifting here
>     was done
>       by Andreas Tobler.
>
>     If you want to run this in QEMU (emulators/qemu-devel from ports
>     works), do something like this:
>
>     cd /usr/src
>     make buildworld buildkernel TARGET=powerpc TARGET_ARCH=powerpc64
>     cd /usr/src/release
>     make release TARGET=powerpc TARGET_ARCH=powerpc64
>     make install DESTDIR=~/pseries
>     (the above will be the steps re@ takes in the next ALPHA/BETA
>     release (probably) after ALPHA2)
>
>     qemu-system-ppc64 -m 512 -cdrom ~/pseries/release.iso -monitor
>     stdio -drive id=root,if=none,file=~/pseries/release.iso -device
>     usb-storage,drive=root -vga none -usb -net nic,model=e1000,vlan=0
>     -net user,vlan=0
>
>     and switch to the serial port display. You may or may not need to
>     enter this at the mountroot prompt:
>     cd9660:/dev/da0 ro
>
>     As you can tell from the length of the QEMU command, we are still
>     missing a few drivers to run out of the box:
>     - PAPR LPAR virtualized SCSI
>     - PAPR LPAR virtualized Ethernet
>     - QEMU framebuffer
>
>     It is also possible that the CD image you make above will work on
>     actual IBM hardware. If you happen to have any compatible
>     hardware, test results would be very interesting!
>     -Nathan
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