skiboot is boot and runtime firmware for OpenPower systems. There are other components that make up all the firmware you need, but if you’re, say, a Linux kernel, you’re going to be interacting with skiboot.

I recently committed doc/versioning.txt to skiboot to try and explain our current thoughts on versioning releases.

It turns out that picking version numbers is a bit harder than you’d expect, especially when you want to construct a version string to display in places that has semantic meaning. In fact, the writing on Semantic Versioning influenced us heavily.

Since we’re firmware, making incompatible API changes is something we should basically never, ever do. Old kernels should must boot and work on new firmware and new kernels should boot and function on old firmware (and if they don’t, it plainly be a kernel bug). So, ignore the Major version parts of Semantic Versioning for us :)

For each new release, we plan to bump the minor version for mostly bug fix releases, while bump the major version for added functionality. Any additional information is to describe the version on that particular platform – as everybody shipping OPAL is likely to build it themselves with possibly some customizations (e.g. YOUR COMPANY NAME HERE, support for some on board RAID card or on-board automated coffee maker). See doc/versioning.txt for details.

You may wonder why we started at 4.0 for our first real version number. Well… this is purely a cunning plan to avoid confusion with other things, the details of which will only be extracted out of my when plied with a suitable amount of excellent craft beer (because if I’m going to tell a boring story, I may as well have awesome craft beer).