There’s been some work on porting FreeBSD over to run natively on top of OPAL, that is, on bare metal OpenPower machines (not just under KVM).

This is one of four possible things to run natively on an OPAL system:

1. Linux
2. hello_world (in skiboot tree)
3. ppc64le_hello (as I wrote about yesterday)
4. FreeBSD

It’s great to see that another fully featured OS is getting ported to POWER8 and OPAL. It’s not yet at a stage where you could say it was finished or anything (PCI support is pretty preliminary for example, and fancy things like disks and networking live on PCI).