And hot on the heels of the latest OpenBSD release is the latest FreeBSD iteration, 13.2-RELEASE. FreeBSD has a longer track record on OpenPOWER and in my cursory estimates is the most commonly installed BSD on modern Power ISA. One big jump is that

and by default can create the same number of vCPUs as physical CPUs, which is quite useful to us once you get away from the smallest single-4 machines given all our cores are SMT-4. Additionally, for those of you running FreeBSD on a VM (such as an LPAR or under KVM), nested POWER9 radix MMU mappings are now

, substantially reducing hypercall overhead. The Linux compatibility ABI has also been expanded and on the security side ASLR is now enabled for all 64-bit executables by default, configurable through

. Downloads are available for big-endian and little-endian. Note that the release notes indicate that all PowerPC and Power ISA releases right now must run

manually after an upgraded successful kernel and world installation.