skiboot-6.6

skiboot v6.6 was released on Wednesday April 22nd 2020. It is the first release of skiboot 6.6 series, which becomes the new stable release following the skiboot-6.5 release, first released August 16th 2019.

There hasn’t been a skiboot release in a while and this release doesn’t contain a huge number of new features for users, just a lot of bug fixes, and additional platform support. The next release should be a little more lively with a number of internal refactorings and new features on the way.

New features

  • Skiboot is now dual licensed as Apache 2.0 -OR- GPLv2+

    There are some files still licensed Apache 2.0 only due to contributions that we are unable to change the license of, but they are the minority.

  • Skiboot can now be built as little endian, thanks to Team Nick.

    Doing so requires building with: make LITTLE_ENDIAN=1

  • OpenCAPI reset support

    This is to allow FPGA-based OpenCAPI devices to be re-flashed with a new device image, then reset to activate the new image. Although it is based on top of the existing PCI Hotplug support it does require some OS changes to function.

  • The OPAL_PHB_SET_OPTION and OPAL_PHB_GET_OPTION OPAL calls

    These OPAL calls provide the OS with a means for controlling per-PHB settings. Currently this allows the OS to enable or disable the the “Global MMIO EEH Disable” and “4GTE” settings which are available on Power9 / PHB4. See the PHB specification for more details.

Removed features

  • Fast-reboot is now disabled by default.

    Fast-reboot will continue to be supported, but as an opt-in feature rather than the default. From the commit (ee07f2c68160) message:

    This has two user visible changes:

1. Full reboot is now the default. In order to get fast-reboot as the
   default the nvram option needs to be set:

        nvram -p ibm,skiboot --update-config fast-reset=1

2. The nvram option to force a fast-reboot even when some part of
   skiboot has called disable_fast_reboot() has changed from
   'fast-reset=im-feeling-lucky' to 'force-fast-reset=1' because
   it's impossible to actually use that 'feature' if fast-reboot is
   off by default.

        nvram -p ibm,skiboot --update-config force-fast-reset=1