Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Little Endian

Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by Annatar on Friday July 22, 2016 @08:26AM (#12143111)

$4,900 for a barebones system is still too high for a platform meant to compete with a PC tin bucket server, where 1U barebones start at $800, and a decent 32GB / 4TB server can be had for $1,800.

Next on the list, if I don't want to run Linux (and I don't) what other freeware choices do I have? As far as I know only beta versions of AIX were gratis, everything else had a hefty licensing fee. Those kinds of games don't fly in this day and age, hence anything that is not intel and freeware and open source has been relegated to dwindling sales, and close to non-existent market uptake. itanium, POWER, UltraSPARC - examples aplenty.

When will AIX, the volume manager, and the compilers become freeware / open source, or at the very least freeware?

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by IntelMiner on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:16PM (#12147453)

Do you have any specific preference for what operating system you'd want to run? Linux seems to be what most people are going to run on it, though the devices do also run AIX (according to Wikipedia)

Have you looked into the various BSD's to see if they support it (yet?) I used them a couple years ago on some old Apple PPC hardware I had clunking around as they ended up running circles around Linux in hardware support and stability

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by Annatar on Saturday July 23, 2016 @04:55AM (#12148867)

(Disclaimer: PPC Yellowdog Linux on PlayStation 3 used to be my primary development system.)

I'd prefer SmartOS, but that only works on intel, as PPC support was removed from the illumos kernel a long, long time ago. Nevertheless, reverting those changesets and getting it running again would be cool.

Next on the list, then, would be AIX, an operating system developed on POWER for POWER.

I also read that FreeBSD has some POWER support, but unlike AIX, it's nowhere near production quality material yet. FreeBSD would have been my next choice.

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by wnoise on Friday July 22, 2016 @02:22PM (#12145575)

I believe FreeBSD also run on POWER8.

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