[moody__]

I really wanted to. I was working on getting a POWER64 port of 9front going, so far I have most of userspace compiling and linking but nothing for a kernel. A friend of mine had a Raptor Talos 2 that was having some issues that he sent over to me to try to use. I did a bunch of debugging of it and concluded there must be some issue with the motherboard. I have tried to contact Raptor some number of times to see what it would cost/take to get this machines repaired but have heard nothing. I've tried their irc channels and support tickets ... nothing back. This experience didn't make me confident in spending the money on a new machine.

In the meantime I have tried to do some work with QEMU but I ran in to some snag in understanding exactly how "hypervisor" mode works according to the POWER9 manual. It has some confusing conditions about hypervisor mode and managing the page table, I had tried to join the IBM mailing list for openpower and had asked to see if someone could explain how the hypervisor mode worked more comprehensively, but got nothing back. Of course there really isn't a wealth of information to help me figure this out the otherwise.

I say this because both of these were symptoms of the same problem. POWER is really not hobbyist friendly, both in investment cost and in support. There just isn't enough of an ecosystem in my experience.