When will OpenPOWER OpenBSD be now? Soon.

The tease of the week is this tweet from the OpenBSD maintainers, which indicates ppc64 (as "powerpc64" and implying big-endian) support is coming to OpenBSD.

It should be noted that this initial patch is very preliminary, largely just the rudiments for getting the kernel to boot, but that's more than it's done previously. It should also be noted that locore.S has dependencies on OPAL (i.e., the Open Power Abstraction Layer), which is provided by Skiboot, so pre-OpenPOWER systems like the Power Mac G5 need not apply (the G5 in particular is better served by OpenBSD/macppc). However, I don't see anything in this first pass that wouldn't work on POWER8.

When I get my "old" dual-4 Talos II up and running again this sounds like something worth experimenting with, and this would probably be the easiest route to getting NetBSD up on OpenPOWER hardware as well (my personal BSD of choice which I run on several systems currently, including a Macintosh IIci). Meanwhile, if you're going to go full Dark Helmet and want a BSD on your OpenPOWER systems that's available Now, look at FreeBSD, which is currently the most mature BSD available for our machines.