FreeBSD on the POWER8: it's alive

It's great to see IBM move slowly towards an open POWER architecture. At Red Hat we have access to lots of POWER7 and POWER8 hardware and it really is the fastest hardware available for anything, many times faster than x86-64 (of course with a massive cost and power budget to go with that). But when am I going to be able to buy POWER8 hardware for myself?? Is the expensive and experimental Tyan mobo the only thing?

Interesting development, let&#x27;s hope that IBM will pick this up and run with it as an officially supported OS at some point. It would give lots more room upwards for when you&#x27;re about to max out a single server x86 set-up.<p>It won&#x27;t be long before someone runs a top-of-the-line X86 to Power8 benchmark using FreeBSD.<p>Here is such a comparison using linux:<p><a href="http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh092914-story02.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.itjungle.com&#x2F;tfh&#x2F;tfh092914-story02.html</a>

Great use for Erlang (e.g. WhatsApp)?<p>Given that Erlang can scale near linearly with more cores and it&#x27;s not uncommon to have 100+ cores for a single Power8 node - it makes me wonder how much investigation has gone into Power8 as an architecture for companies who have highly network centric products like WhatsApp.<p>Edit: WhatsApp is a highly network centric product and they also run on FreeBSD &#x2F; Erlang.<p>Edit 2: If you want to try out Power8, OVH has cloud compute available of Power8 at <a href="https://www.runabove.com/instances/ibm-power8.xml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.runabove.com&#x2F;instances&#x2F;ibm-power8.xml</a>

- he&#x27;s figured out the KVM issues, their lack of support for some mandated hypervisor APIs and other bugs<p>- then found the existing powerpc pmap (physical memory management) code wasn&#x27;t very SMP friendly<p>- also found the PS3 hypervisor layer isn&#x27;t thread-safe<p>These are some of the reasons that I care about NetBSD (which runs on some 56 architectures with its single codebase) so much -- the real-world work supporting real-world architectures can pay off everywhere -- it&#x27;s not just academic work or nostalgia&#x2F;eccentricity.

Can someone with access please run some cpu benchmarks ala anandtech? Thanks!