Follow-up: Power Architecture Related Tracks Proposed for UDS-r

A few weeks ago I posted about some tracks at UDS concerning PowerPC. Here are links to the session results.

• Virtualization support for Power architecture
• Power Architecture Kernel Development
• PowerPC Bootloader Options

I need to clean up the items. The main take away is that the PowerPC kernels will be maintained separately from the mainline kernels, which means we will be getting support for some new architectures. It will probably be a couple of weeks before I get this setup, but expect it nonetheless.

The other side is the boot loader. This is a tricky and complex implementation point. Details are in the session notes, but this may have implications based on relevant work being done on ARM as well.

That's the extent of it at this point. Looking forward to great things with Raring.

Servergy Announces New PowerPC Developer Board

DISCLAIMER: I work for Servergy, Inc.

This week, at UDS, Servergy has announced that it will be designing and selling a PowerPC based developer board like no other currently on the market. Typical Power dev kits are using out-dated and feature-poor CPUs. As a follow up, they made this formal announcement.

Servergy plans many needed features, including:

• Multi-core processor
• Hardware virtualization (via Linux kernel KVM)
• Gigabit ethernet
• HDMI video output
• Network offloading engines
• SATA controller
• Audio output
• USB Ports
• SD Card slot

Servergy has dubbed this board P-Cubed.

They are planning a wide range of software support including firmware/boot-loader source code and pre-built images for creating bootable SD cards. Support for major Linux distributions will include Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE.

The platform is geared toward making modern Power systems available to developers for a fraction of the cost of full fledged server systems (Servergy's primary market). While the board is aimed at increasing the ecosystem and community around Linux-on-Power, the pricing is sure to attract hobbyists and students as well.

While Servergy did not say the exact price, they are aiming at a sub-$200 system. Keep an eye on Servergy's website for news and pre-order form.

Power Architecture Related Tracks Proposed for UDS-r

On my ramp-up toward UDS-r, I've created some blueprints and pinged some related folks to get them into the proper tracks.

I'm hoping to get a lot of interest and discussion around there, so here they are:

• Virtualization support for Power architecture
• Power Architecture Kernel Development
• PowerPC Bootloader Options

So this covers a wide range of topics. The most in-depth one is the Virtualization blueprint. As of yet, I've not seen a lot of broad support for non-x86 in OpenStack and related software. While it works (I've set it up), it just doesn't do a lot to make me happy happy.

The boot loaders blueprint is basically an RFC. The idea of Power architecture on a non-embedded system not having OpenFirmware is about on par with Dell selling an Intel system without a BIOS. The Power systems do have u-Boot (Das Boot), but that's not as robust as it needs to be. I'm thinking something like grub2 being compiled agains the u-Boot API that u-Boot can load modularly or perhaps something like the kexec based loader that the ps3 used.

Finally, the kernel development is a host discussion that needs to be hammered out with the Canonical Kernel Team so we can all be happy and not step on the primary architectures, but still being able to spread some support for newer Power equipment.

Cheers and see you in Denmark!

EDIT: Updated link for boot loaders blueprint