Raptor Computing Talos II

Most computers ship with firmware you are not allowed to read. On this board the owner can fetch the source for every stage of it — the OpenBMC image on the service processor, the host firmware that trains the memory and brings up the buses, the small Linux that presents the boot menu — and rebuild the lot from Raptor’s public git server using their published instructions. The audit goes almost all the way down. Where it stops is the hardware: Raptor posts component-location drawings for the board but keeps the full circuit schematic owner-only, on the recovery media that ships with the machine rather than on the web. So “you can see everything” carries one honest asterisk, and I would rather write the asterisk down than pretend it isn’t there.

The machine has an odd origin. The fully-open POWER9 workstation that OpenPOWER people point to exists because its POWER8 predecessor failed. Raptor ran a Crowd Supply campaign for the original Talos, an ATX POWER8 workstation, and it closed on 14 January 2017 having raised $516,050 against a $3.7 million goal. Fourteen percent, from 269 backers. That is not a near miss. Rather than fold, Raptor announced the successor on 1 September 2017 and sold it as a plain pre-order product on its own store, timed to the POWER9 launch that quarter, with no second campaign to fund it. The thing that made the platform famous shipped the boring way, as stock you could order.

The board itself is a dual-socket EATX mainboard, part number T2P9D01, for IBM’s POWER9. Two SKUs share that design: the standard TL2MB1, with two sockets and sixteen DDR4 slots, and the cheaper single-socket TL1MB1, the “Talos II Lite,” announced in May 2018 with eight slots and one CPU. Raptor also sells the same board built up into workstations and rack systems. It should not be confused with the Blackbird, which is a separate, smaller single-socket micro-ATX POWER9 board, a cousin rather than a Talos II variant. The whole line is still sold by Raptor direct as of 3 July 2026, which for a machine of this kind is worth saying plainly.

The firmware runs in stages, as Raptor’s wiki lays it out. A Self-Boot Engine wakes first from fused silicon and on-chip memory, then hands to Hostboot, which trains the DRAM, initialises the buses, and chainloads Skiboot. Skiboot brings up PCIe, builds the device trees, and implements OPAL, the runtime interface the operating system calls into, then loads Skiroot: a minimal Linux whose only job is to run Petitboot, the boot loader that finds and starts the real OS. OpenBMC runs the whole time on a separate Aspeed AST2500 service processor, off to the side of that chain. Each of those pieces has its own repository on Raptor’s git server, forked from the upstream OpenPOWER projects.

It is in the lab as build capacity. A POWER9 machine is one of the heavier boxes behind the release engineering platform, and the job I have set for it is one corner of a harder experiment: compiling a Linux distribution for the Genesi Efika, a 400 MHz 32-bit PowerPC board that cannot build for itself. The Efika is big-endian and the mirrors have mostly forgotten it; the POWER9 is little-endian and fast. Using the second to cross-build for the first is the kind of work the lab exists to attempt. Whether it holds together is a question for later.

The invoice settles the build. It is the dual-socket board — the “Talos II Mainboard (Board Only)” at $2,674.72 — with both sockets filled by matching 8-core POWER9 v2 CPUs at $774.14 each, each under its own 2U heatsink assembly, and an LSI 9300-8i eight-port SAS 3.0 HBA bought alongside it for the storage side. So this is the TL2MB1, not the Lite: a true dual-socket machine, assembled from parts rather than ordered as a finished system. What I have actually built on the open firmware — whether I have rebuilt any stage of the stack from Raptor’s git server, and what that was like — is still to be documented.

Sources: Raptor’s own T2P9D01 User’s Guide (v1.06) and its Talos II, firmware, and schematics wiki pages — all Raptor properties, counted as one source — for the board, the firmware chain, and the schematic policy; Crowd Supply’s Talos campaign page and its 2017 “Talos is Back” announcement for the funding numbers and the pre-order timeline; and Phoronix for the Talos II Lite launch. The specifications page carries the per-variant detail and the figures that disagree across Raptor’s own documents.