Recently, we merged into the op-build project (the build scripts for OpenPOWER Firmware) a defconfig for building OPAL for (certain) POWER9 simulators. I won’t bother linking over to articles on the POWER9 chip or schedule (there’s search engines for that), but with this commit – if you happen to be able to get your hands on a POWER9 simulator, you can now boot to the petitboot bootloader on it!

We’re using upstream Linux 4.7.0-rc3 and upstream skiboot (master), so all of this code is already upstream!

Now, by no means is this complete. There’s some fairly fundamental things that are missing (e.g. PCI) – but how many other platforms can you build open source firmware for before you can even get your hands on a simulator?