Good news everyone! Tyan has announced the availability of their first OpenPOWER system! They call this a Customer Reference System, which means it’s an excellent machine to start poking at OpenPower and POWER8 (or deploying applications on).

Because it’s an OpenPower machine, it runs the open source Open Power firmware (all up on github) and will happily run Linux (feel free to port your other operating system kernels). I’ll be writing more on the OpenPower firmware soon as, well, technical details are fun!

Ubuntu 14.10 is listed as recommended as not only have they been building for POWER8 but have spent some time ensuring things work fairly well out-of-the-box (both as a KVM guest and running native on the bare metal). Or, you can always just boot whatever the mainline kernel is at – build for the POWERNV (POWER non-virtualized) platform (be sure to include all the required drivers) and have fun!