{"id":3910,"date":"2014-12-03T14:18:16","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T04:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/?p=3910"},"modified":"2014-12-03T14:18:16","modified_gmt":"2014-12-03T04:18:16","slug":"skibootopal-versioning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/03\/skibootopal-versioning\/","title":{"rendered":"skiboot\/OPAL versioning"},"content":{"rendered":"

skiboot<\/a> is boot and runtime firmware for OpenPower<\/a> systems. There are other components<\/a> that make up all the firmware you need, but if you’re, say, a Linux<\/a> kernel, you’re going to be interacting with skiboot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I recently committed doc\/versioning.txt<\/a> to skiboot to try and explain our current thoughts on versioning releases.<\/p>\n

It turns out that picking version numbers is a bit harder than you’d expect, especially when you want to construct a version string to display in places that has semantic meaning. In fact, the writing on Semantic Versioning<\/a> influenced us heavily.<\/p>\n

Since we’re firmware, making incompatible API changes is something we should basically never, ever do. Old kernels should<\/del> must boot and work on new firmware and new kernels should boot and function on old firmware (and if they don’t, it plainly be a kernel bug). So, ignore the Major version parts of Semantic Versioning<\/a> for us :)<\/p>\n

For each new release, we plan to bump the minor version for mostly bug fix releases, while bump the major version for added functionality. Any additional information is to describe the version on that particular platform – as everybody shipping OPAL is likely to build it themselves with possibly some customizations (e.g. YOUR COMPANY NAME HERE, support for some on board RAID card or on-board automated coffee maker). See doc\/versioning.txt<\/a> for details.<\/p>\n

You may wonder why we started at 4.0 for our first real version number. Well… this is purely a cunning plan to avoid confusion with other things, the details of which will only be extracted out of my when plied with a suitable amount of excellent craft beer (because if I’m going to tell a boring story, I may as well have awesome craft beer).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

skiboot is boot and runtime firmware for OpenPower systems. There are other components that make up all the firmware you need, but if you’re, say, a Linux kernel, you’re going to be interacting with skiboot. I recently committed doc\/versioning.txt to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[570,588,615],"tags":[636,587,637,616,584],"class_list":["post-3910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ibm-work-et-al","category-opal","category-powerpc","tag-opal","tag-openpower","tag-powerpc","tag-ppc64","tag-skiboot"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5a6n8-114","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3775,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/17\/openpower-firmware-up-on-github\/","url_meta":{"origin":3910,"position":0},"title":"OpenPower firmware up on github!","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2014-07-17","format":false,"excerpt":"With the whole OpenPower thing, a lot of low level firmware is being open sourced, which is really exciting for the platform - the less proprietary code sitting in memory the better in my books. If you go to https:\/\/github.com\/open-power you'll see code for a bunch of the low level\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "code"","block_context":{"text":"code","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/code\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4072,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/20\/building-opal-firmware-for-power9\/","url_meta":{"origin":3910,"position":1},"title":"Building OPAL firmware for POWER9","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2016-06-20","format":false,"excerpt":"Recently, we merged into the op-build project (the build scripts for OpenPOWER Firmware) a defconfig for building OPAL for (certain) POWER9 simulators. I won't bother linking over to articles on the POWER9 chip or schedule (there's search engines for that), but with this commit - if you happen to be\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "IBM"","block_context":{"text":"IBM","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/work-et-al\/ibm-work-et-al\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3972,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/16\/opal-firmware-specification-conformance-and-documentation\/","url_meta":{"origin":3910,"position":2},"title":"OPAL firmware specification, conformance and documentation","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2015-06-16","format":false,"excerpt":"Now that we have an increasing amount of things that run on top of OPAL: Linux hello_world (in skiboot tree) ppc64le_hello (as I wrote about yesterday) FreeBSD and that the OpenPower ecosystem is rapidly growing (especially around people building OpenPower machines), the need for more formal specification, conformance testing and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "code"","block_context":{"text":"code","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/code\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4076,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/12\/using-smatch-static-analysis-on-openpower-opal-firmware\/","url_meta":{"origin":3910,"position":3},"title":"Using Smatch static analysis on OpenPOWER OPAL firmware","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2016-07-12","format":false,"excerpt":"For Skiboot, I'm always looking at new automated systems to find bugs in the code. A little while ago, I read about the Smatch tool developed by some folks at Oracle (they also wrote about using it on the Linux kernel). I was eager to try it with skiboot to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "code"","block_context":{"text":"code","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/code\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3965,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/12\/gcov-code-coverage-for-openpower-firmware\/","url_meta":{"origin":3910,"position":4},"title":"gcov code coverage for OpenPower firmware","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2015-06-12","format":false,"excerpt":"For skiboot (which provides the OPAL boot and runtime firmware for OpenPower machines), I've been pretty interested at getting some automated code coverage data for booting on real hardware (as well as in a simulator). Why? Well, it's useful to see that various test suites are actually testing what you\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "code"","block_context":{"text":"code","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/code\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3940,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2015\/02\/03\/building-openpower-firmware-for-use-in-power8-simulator\/","url_meta":{"origin":3910,"position":5},"title":"Building OpenPower firmware for use in POWER8 Simulator","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2015-02-03","format":false,"excerpt":"Previously, I blogged on how to Run skiboot (OPAL) on the POWER8 Simulator. If you want to build the full Open Power firmware environment, including the Petitboot bootloader and kernel, you can now do so! 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