# FreeBSD on POWER8



## jackp (Oct 26, 2014)

A cloud-service provider called RunAbove (an offshoot of OVH) recently launched a new service with POWER8-based compute instances. The only operating systems supported so far are Fedora 19 and Ubuntu 14.04.

I've suggested an idea to support FreeBSD for their POWER8 instances, please consider voting if you have the time (and also check out the service, it seems pretty nice, and you get a $32 credit for the POWER8 instances when you sign up):

https://community.runabove.com/share/topic/support-freebsd-for-power8


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## SirDice (Oct 28, 2014)

It won't do any good if FreeBSD itself is unable to run on POWER8 hardware. If I read things correctly POWER8 is a continuation of the PowerPC platform and FreeBSD doesn't have very good PowerPC support. It's a Tier 2 platform. So I doubt it will even run on POWER8 without some serious hacking by the FreeBSD developers.


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## sossego (Mar 23, 2015)

Supposedly, POWER8 is to be an open platform with a catch : http://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/levels/


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## Beastie7 (Mar 24, 2015)

Are there any architectural advantages with POWER over x86? Why waste resources and developer time?


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## Crivens (Mar 24, 2015)

One reason would be to escape the lock-in currently on the way with Windows-10. Once that takes off, it will be much harder to get good hardware. Also, supporting more than one architecture will force cleaner code, as it forbids you to make all kinds of assumptions. Or, if you make them, it makes it harder to get away with it. And from an architecture view, the PowerPC is much more elegant than x86.


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## diizzy (Mar 24, 2015)

Harder? Please elaborate
//Danne


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## Crivens (Mar 25, 2015)

Simply assuming the range of int, endianess, alignment restrictions, ... there is a lot of assumptions you can take. But when your code works well on little- and big endian machines, on 32 bits, 64 bits and so on - then you can be more confident that the code is portable. Because it is. And you are then not locked onto one hardware but can take the code to somewhere else if you need. And in case this Boot Guard is taking off, there will be some code moving.


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## protocelt (Apr 1, 2015)

Looks like there is actual work being done to support this:
Thread 50503
https://wiki.freebsd.org/POWER8


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