Raptor Blackbird mATX board coming - IBM POWER9 / ECC RAM / Appliance market

[James Doyle]

Finally a low price point, entry level POWER9 board is coming. It will support 2x DDR4 ECC RAM and have one PCIe x16 and an x8.

Can it FreeNAS? https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raptor-Blackbird-Details

The OpenPOWER people are now actively hocking "Security" and "Made in the USA". So that will bring some interest in this platform, despite the wealth of AMD and Intel options. The IBM platform has some interesting features - IOMMU - and coresident OPAL firmware. After the Supermicro scandal with China, it is something I might be interested in anyways (despite being an IBM guy).

Personally, I wont be happy until I can have a small desktop s390x machine that runs z/VM and z/OS Home Edition. Bring it on IBM!

 

[danb35]

Can it FreeNAS?

Can it FreeBSD? There's no indication I can see so far of OS support other than Linux.

 

[James Doyle]

Can it FreeBSD? There's no indication I can see so far of OS support other than Linux.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/powerpc/POWER8

I see an item here that FreeBSD can run on bare metal as well as PowerKVM as a guest. I guess the next question is how does one get FreeBSD onto a new Power platform. The chips they are using seem non-controversial. Its the motherboard chips - IOMMU vs the ASICs and North/Southbridges we are used to. The second question is, If FreeBSD can run on Bare Metal - can we also run PowerKVM and use the Virtualization we are used to on x86_64 FreeNAS?

 

[Arwen]

One thing people overlook with Power processors, is that the newer ones support more than 2 threads per core.
In the case of Power9, it's either 4 or 8 threads per core, depending on type of Power9.

So, for example the 4 core mentioned above, it might have 16 threads. That's the SMT4 capable comment on the Raptor web page for the Power9 4 core varient.

Next, Power processors have the ability to support time division multiplexing for virtual machines. This is different from what Sun / Oracle do for their "Cool Threads" line. Those use thread(s) or core dedication for their Logical Domains. Or what x64 does, simple time slice by program or hypervisior.


I wish IBM had a home version of AIX. Perhaps having no real support, except perhaps forums. But able to download patches and updates. Otherwise, you basically need a job which has AIX servers to learn and experiment with AIX. Catch-22 if it's a job requirement.