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Comment by jalfresi | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite naive regarding Power processors; does anyone know where I can see any motherboards with prices for power processors, or even if any of the BSDs run on them? It seems like it would be quite a nice platform/OS combination that side-steps the traditional Apple/OSX vs Intel/Linux workstation options

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In he case of the IBM Power processor, it'd be difficult to find the individual pieces. The computers are typically sold as prefab units by IBM or a third party. Not much of a build-it-yourself market.

That said, they're expensive like any high end datacenter-grade hardware.

So then these are not like the PowerPC chips used in the PowerMacs and Amiga One computers?

More like a minicomputer or mainframe level power?

I've seen this mentioned a few times when Power chips come up: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php

OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD all have support for the older Apple G4 and G5 hardware. Obviously being older they are kind of slow (especially compared to amd64) but if you just use them as file servers they are fine. The biggest problem with BSD on PowerPC, in my opinion, is the lack of modern programming languages. I believe on BSD you are stuck with C, C++, ruby, python, and perl mostly. No node, no Java, no golang, no rust. If you use Debian you have access to Java.

Keep in mind Power != PowerPC. Related families but there are differences (exercise left to the reader).

While Go doesn't have a port to BSD on POWER, there is a Go port for POWER on Linux (it's the s390x port).

I imagine it shouldn't be too difficult (relatively speaking) to do the port as a result.

s390!=POWER

The GOARCH for power is ppc64/ppc64le AFAIK.

(s390x is the mainframe processor, aka z/Architecture, the latest being the z13 which is most definitely not a power8/9.)

I had thought s390x could be based on POWER8/9, but you're right, that doesn't appear to be the case. I apologise. Regardless, Go does consider S390x to be a separate port.

As I understand it, the s390x ISA is fully backwards compatible to stone tablets. But it's essentially a POWER chip with a bit of extra decoder logic.

There's actually very little in common between z/Arch and Power, but I don't blame you since "everybody knows" they are the same thing.

Yah, most of the descriptions (just a little extra decode, aka PowerPC AS), and sharing the hardware actually apply to the iSeries, which _IS_ POWER based. But of course that is a minicomputer not a maninframe...

It seems the vast majority of people who consider themselves knowledgeable about computers are just massively ignorant/confused by IBM's product lines and capabilities (and don't even get me started about the nonstop and openvms). Which is a bit of a shame, particularly in the case of IBM i, which is probably one of the most interesting OS's still in support/production.

Today I learned. Thanks.

S390x (IBM System z) is an arch distinct from POWER. They both have Go ports, though.

edit: failed to refresh

The Go port is ppc64le, the new ABI (elf v2) which is Linux only at present, the BSDs support the elf v1 ppc ABI, which is a bit different and would need a different port, although it is mainly endianness and how function pointers work.

As others have said s390x is nothing to do with Power.

What? Why wouldn't you have access to node? Source is available for those, and node even specifically addresses the BSDs[1]. I heard go does something kind of odd with system calls, so I could see if possibly having a problem (but I really don't know enough to state definitively).

I'm not sure if rust targets that platform/arch combo, but I could see it being deferred while they focus on more common ones.

Edit: It just occurred to me that Node's (V8's) optimized JIT probably uses ASM or at least routines optimized for x86, so that would complicate deployment.

1: https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/#freebsd-and-...

Yeah, v8 is pretty famous for its lack of interpreter, though it looks like IBM is working on a port. You could also use the Chakra or SpiderMonkey ports.

  > I'm not sure if rust targets that platform/arch combo

It's the PPC bit that's tough at the moment, we do provide tier 2 support for {free,net}BSD on x86_64.

I figured. Although this isn't PowerPC, but Power, and what little I was able to find quickly seems to indicate the instruction set has evolved since it was branched for PowerPC. I imagine even if PowerPC targeted binaries work on Power, they wouldn't use the platform to the fullest.

Oh yeah, right. Point is, yeah, not yet. I wonder what LLVM's support of these arches is.

IBM has been investing heavily in the toolchain, so LLVM has decent support for PowerPC.

That hasn't translated into working FreeBSD support yet though. It's still stuck using GCC 4.2 on ppc, which is a real pain.

I know that there is some work on porting Rust to ppc64le which is gradually coming together.

What about gccgo? "Gccgo, however, supports all the processors that GCC supports" Source: https://blog.golang.org/gccgo-in-gcc-471

Many programs dont work with gccgo though.

Well, if you have C, you can get to pretty much anything else (maybe with some porting effort).

I definitely built and ran Erlang on a G4 powerbook several years back.

Java is now available for BSD on powerpc64. A set of patches were developed to add ppc64 support and have been officially committed to the bsd-port of openjdk8.

Node also supports powerpc. Support was added courtesy the team at IBM.

I have both working on my PowerMac G5, running FreeBSD 10.2.

I believe you can buy the Tyan boards and get prices. They are not cheap but not unreasonable http://www.tyan.com/solutions/tyan_openpower_system.html

FreeBSD runs on modern Power I believe, but the other BSDs only run on older hardware AFAIK, although IBM is pretty good at providing hardware so that may have changed.

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