Now that we have an increasing amount of things that run on top of OPAL:

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

and that the OpenPower ecosystem is rapidly growing (especially around people building OpenPower machines), the need for more formal specification, conformance testing and documentation for OPAL is increasing rapidly.

If you look at the documentation in the skiboot tree late last year, you’d notice a grand total of seven text files. Now, we’re a lot better (although far from complete).

I’m proud to say that I won’t merge new code that adds/modifies an OPAL API call or anything in the device tree that doesn’t come with accompanying documentation, and this has meant that although it may not be perfect, we have something that is a decent starting point.

We’re in the interesting situation of starting with a working system, with mainline Linux kernels now for over a year (maybe even 18 months) being able to be booted by skiboot and run on powernv hardware (the more modern the kernel the better though).

So…. if anyone loves going through deeply technical documentation… do I have a project you can contribute to!