Recently, I was at the OpenPOWER Summit in San Jose where people could see the Barreleye server (specs and design here, initial Rackspace blog post here). Barreleye is an OpenCompute form factor POWER8 server. It’s not only an OpenPOWER machine, which means all of the host firmware is free and open source software, but there’s also OpenBMC meaning that the source to the OS and userspace running on the BMC (service processor) is also open!

In addition, the firmware enablement came from Foxconn (see this skiboot commit), which means we’re being successful in enabling people who aren’t part of IBM to join the development community for OpenPOWER firmware and get the changes needed to support their machines accepted upstream.

Granted, the size of a firmware development community is always likely to be relatively small, but I really like how Foxconn has shown leadership to other ODMs on interacting with and becoming part of the OpenPOWER firmware community.