Software > User Zone
Rough edges and how I work around them (or not)
Borley:
This post is for documentation purposes and is not meant as a criticism of POWER or Raptor, rather, it is a place for me to think openly regarding my POWER9/Blackbird exerience so far. What is listed here may or may not necessarily be a POWER or Raptor board issue as I have yet to determine the root cause of several items. I welcome any suggestions or even fixes that you may have found in your own situations. The new platform has already forced me to learn quite a bit and hopefully this can be of use to somebody other than myself.
When rebooting sometimes restarts without onboard audio available
complete reboot removing power from the board is required to rectify this situation
System stutter with any I/O activity on the main drive (could be the PCIe-NVMe adapter?)
major I/O on the main drive (copying many large files to) makes the system nearly unusable[/s]
Retrospective: May have been combination of PCIe 3.0 storage and Gnome Shell/Nautilus thumbnailing large assets. No longer an issue.
Harddrive SMART reports an unsafe shutdown for every shutdown
This has not technically been an issue yet, I am just gambling that it won't blow up in my face - does the platform need to issue some kind of shutdown signal to the drive?[/s]
2024: It did not blow up in my face. Since replacing with a PCIe 4.0 storage device, is no longer an issue.
Unavailable dependencies needed for packages that would otherwise be installable:
mozc - that's okay anthy works just as well Just use anthy
anki - one single python package is not built for ppc Ended up writing my own flashcard program. "Resolved".
openshot - one single python package is not built for ppc. none of the other video editors will actually load any video content (missing codec? I'm too dumb to figure this out) openshot-qt
VLC playback
VLC sometimes remains "running" after closing out - cannot even kill it from terminal (kill PID) it *only* closes through system monitor when this occurs
VLC unable to stream online video content, "cannot decode h264" (even though local h264 files run fine (another codec issue?)
Disregard. I've been using mpv instead since at least 2020.
Random lockups - unable to determine the cause yet, running clamav-daemon in on-access scanning mode does seem to trigger it when nautilus begins thumbnailing new media in a directory being opened for the first time - disabled for now
also occured once when cycling through 漢字 within anthy[/s]
has not occurred only twice since thread creation - marking as non-issue
Misc missing software;
obs-studio (now available in Debian repos, as of Bullseye)
openshot-qt (now available in Debian repos, as of Bookworm)
openmw (now available in Debian repos, as of Bullseye)
0ad
dolphin-emu
mupen64plus Gaming == unimportant, trivial issue
ffmpeg botches gif creation when using palattes - standard (ugly) gif creation with ffmpeg is fine however
same exact config + script works okay on x86
ffmpeg (as of 5.1.4-0+deb12u1) botches h264 mp4 video encoding
Manually pass different codec with something like -vcodec mpeg2video or -vcodec vp9
Startup always selects another enP1s0... ethernet port for which there is no profile, must manually select the true port (might just be a GNOME bug?)
No longer an issue.
artha must be launched twice before it actually opens
Trivial issue - very unlikely to be a fault of POWER/Blackbird Options > "Show Artha's window on launch"
Large images in GIMP are much slower to work with despite having a dedicated add in GPU (a weaker GPU on x86 was fine in comparison)
Just need to be more patient with the program/use smaller images[/s]
Performance has long since been adequate. I just retested and it only slows when moving large layers in 4K+ image sizes. Non-issue, "resolved".
ClassicHasClass:
--- Quote ---When rebooting sometimes restarts without onboard audio available
--- End quote ---
I haven't observed the lack of onboard audio on reboots, but I usually don't reboot my Blackbird much when it's on. On the other hand, I still occasionally have situations where it won't put video up on HDMI, or at least my home projector won't see it.
--- Quote ---VLC sometimes remains "running" after closing out
--- End quote ---
This is not specific to the Blackbird; I've seen this on the Talos. I haven't figured out why this occurs. A killall -9 will nuke it.
Alternatively, go to the settings and uncheck Allow only one instance. This doesn't solve the problem but it makes it much less annoying, and you can clean up the corpses later.
--- Quote ---Large images in GIMP are much slower to work with
--- End quote ---
I haven't been happy with GIMP on any platform. I use Krita or azpainter.
Some of your other issues sound more software-motivated, but I think that PCIe-NVMe bridge might be a little rickety.
MauryG5:
The problem of the video that is sometimes missing on HDMI I mentioned this to Raptor myself a while ago, I am aware of the problem and are working to resolve it. When the BMC firmware update is released, the problem will be resolved, we just have to wait for it to come out ... I also often have this problem because in the evening I disconnect the computer from the power supply to avoid power surges or similar things.
q66:
--- Quote from: Borley on January 04, 2020, 05:23:03 pm ---System stutter with any I/O activity on the main drive (could be the PCIe-NVMe adapter?)
major I/O on the main drive (copying many large files to) makes the system nearly unusable
--- End quote ---
Sounds like an un-TRIMed drive, run fstrim on its mountpoint once in a while...
--- Quote from: Borley on January 04, 2020, 05:23:03 pm ---Unavailable dependencies needed for packages that would otherwise be installable:
mozc - that's okay anthy works just as well
anki - one single python package is not built for ppc
openshot - one single python package is not built for ppc. none of the other video editors will actually load any video content (missing codec? I'm too dumb to figure this out)
--- End quote ---
Have your distro build them, we're building all of those in Void and they seem just fine (on little endian anyway, on big endian mozc does not build)
--- Quote from: Borley on January 04, 2020, 05:23:03 pm ---VLC playback
VLC sometimes remains "running" after closing out - cannot even kill it from terminal (kill PID) it *only* closes through system monitor when this occurs
VLC unable to stream online video content, "cannot decode h264" (even though local h264 files run fine (another codec issue?)
--- End quote ---
Use mpv? :P
--- Quote from: Borley on January 04, 2020, 05:23:03 pm ---Misc missing software;
obs-studio
0ad
openmorrowind
dolphin-emu
mupen64plus
--- End quote ---
All of these except mupen64plus build/work on ppc64le nowadays, dolphin-emu does not have a JIT though so it's slow. 0ad needs some patches (available on Raptor wiki), the others don't really need anything.
Borley:
--- Quote from: q66 on January 05, 2020, 04:35:28 pm ----snip-
--- End quote ---
For the longest time, I was under the impression that my distro enables trim by default. Checking systemctl reveals that it is not even running. Looks like I have a project to do!
I also tried out MPV and I like how minimalist it is but didn't explore it enough to find streaming or subtitling features. Maybe it is time for a revisit.
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