OpenBSD Seeing Initial Work Land On Enabling 64-bit POWER

It's arguably long overdue but OpenBSD is seeing initial work on POWERPC64 enablement landing in its source tree.

OpenBSD is joining the ranks of other BSDs and Linux distributions in supporting recent 64-bit IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware. It's still a journey ahead but as of last week the initial pieces of the architecture enablement were merged.

The initial work for a powerpc64 port of OpenBSD has just been committed!

— OpenBSD (@openbsd) May 16, 2020

This will be exciting for those especially from the open-source POWER perspective running the likes of Raptor's Blackbird and Talos II libre systems. While FreeBSD is further along with their POWER support, OpenBSD is known for being a very security-minded operating system and so it jives well with those pursuing Raptor Computing Systems' POWER9 systems that are fully open-source down to the system firmware and interested in that aspect in the name of security and having a blob-free platform.

While there's more work to go on the OpenBSD 64-bit POWER front, it's good to see it progressing.