When will OpenPOWER OpenBSD be now? Now.

We were delighted by the tease that OpenBSD is moving to OpenPOWER (although it is officially big-endian powerpc64, it requires OPAL, so a POWER8 is minimally required). Well, now you can try it out: a powerpc64 snapshot is now available with most of the standard binary distribution sets. The installation documentation is pretty much copy-pasta — I doubt very much that 64-bit PowerPC is supported on AMD Opteron, and I would be impressed to learn that the Pinebook Pro is OpenPOWER — but you should be able to boot from the miniroot (flash it to a USB drive using dd bs=1m) and manually setup and copy the file sets over. Curiously, the X11 distribution sets do not appear to be built yet, so you may be restricted to a text boot and/or the serial console. When I get my spare Talos II back up and running I intend to give this a full shakedown, since this would be a great basis for finally having NetBSD on OpenPOWER (my personal BSD of choice). The fact it doesn't right now is a great shame to an OS that is supposed to run everywhere but doesn't on one of the most open platforms anywhere.