Software > Operating Systems and Porting
FreeBSD - Unfortunately not very TALOS-focused
Jubadub:
--- Quote from: q66 on November 27, 2019, 11:51:53 pm ---You can totally use any GPU you wish on earlier PPC hardware like the PCIe G5. I have an R5 235 in my G5, which was never supported by Apple, as it was released many years after the deprecation of the G5, PCIe is backwards compatible. Similarly, I also have an NVMe SSD in mine, it works alright.
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Yes, I'm aware, sorry for not making my point clear earlier. What I meant was that PCIe 2.0+ GPUs will be limited to PCIe 1.0's bandwidth and not be able to show their true potential. (I, too, have an unsupported GPU in my G5, though it's flashed with modified firmware to still be usable under Mac OS X, and is still just a PCIe 1.0 card, namely an ATI X1950XT 256MB VRAM.)
--- Quote from: q66 on November 27, 2019, 11:51:53 pm ---It'll be slower/necessary because of the requirement for staging buffers and copying along the way, and that's assuming somebody will implement this stuff at all. [...] it's more of an API boundary causing extra copying where not necessary, which however also means this will probably never be ideal.
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That doesn't seem to be an inherent big-endian issue, but just the API not being updated for it. That is indeed a "practical usability problem" (though I'd be wary of overemphasizing that argument, because people could try to justify using x86/ARM over anything else for that same reason, and that's something we don't want to happen). However, that doesn't mean any of it "will always be slower/less eficient" nor that "this will never be ideal", nor does it make the earlier points inaccurate. But now I understand better where you are coming from, so thanks for taking the time to explain your thoughts to me.
--- Quote from: q66 on November 27, 2019, 11:51:53 pm ---[...] it's not a simple matter of choosing one or the other, there are actual considerations you have to keep in mind.
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Oh, absolutely. That is why I stated earlier that "there are certainly advantages and disadvantages over picking one over the other". (Some low-level assembly techniques also exploit each endianness differently, so each has its superior use cases.)
What I meant by saying "either is fine" is that, although each has its own advantages, they both work great, and will be desirable in different situations. Bottom-line is that I do agree FreeBSD, although already 100% Talos-focused, could still additionally offer more builds, in particular little-endian. Of course, the same issue applies to all those other distros like Fedora and Debian and their lack of big-endian options (as tier 1, at least).
q66:
--- Quote from: Jubadub on November 29, 2019, 08:51:12 am ---That doesn't seem to be an inherent big-endian issue, but just the API not being updated for it. That is indeed a "practical usability problem" (though I'd be wary of overemphasizing that argument, because people could try to justify using x86/ARM over anything else for that same reason, and that's something we don't want to happen). However, that doesn't mean any of it "will always be slower/less eficient" nor that "this will never be ideal", nor does it make the earlier points inaccurate. But now I understand better where you are coming from, so thanks for taking the time to explain your thoughts to me.
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No, it quite literally will be. These things are required to present you with everything in host (CPU) endianness. This is not going to change (especially with big endian being more or less dead on client hardware, and these APIs being very much established at this point, so they can't change without actively breaking applications), and as long as it's not going to change, it's pointless to argue what it is inherent to or not. The only thing that could change the situation is having bi/big-endian GPU hardware, and have fun convincing GPU vendors to do that (if anything, it seems to be moving in the *opposite* direction)
Raion:
As somebody who dislikes Apple hardware and has no use for anything that is big endian in a modern work load capacity, their refusal to even consider a separate platform for little endian POWER upsets me. personally though I am always the type of person who believes that leaving behind older systems is a reasonable use case. People who are familiar with me on other forums would know that I abandoned powerpc years ago, even at one point having to destroy several powermac g5s because I couldn't pay for somebody to take them away. Living in a rural area will do that so they became tannerite targets.
I think that like with 32-bit x86, it's pretty unreasonable at this point to hold back little endian POWER because of systems that are over a decade old at this point. There are no consumer-grade PowerPC systems currently being manufactured other than the A-eon systems and you would be daft to pay $2,000 for one of those when you could already buy a blackbird for the majority of that price and have a very respectable configuration.
q66:
that's kind of a bad attitude to have, considering it's largely thanks to those older systems that the ppc desktop stack is in as good of a shape as it is (IBM doesn't give a shit about anything but headless server/HPC stuff) as well as that support for the platform exists on minority OSes like freebsd at all
besides, i see no reason to kill off older hardware that still serves its purpose perfectly fine for many people - doing otherwise just reeks of planned obsolescence
there's a sizeable community of people running older ppc machines who often couldn't afford buying a blackbird or whatever in the first place
nglevin:
--- Quote from: Raion on November 24, 2019, 10:15:08 pm ---I've considered once I get a POWER board on doing a fork of FreeBSD for POWER64el, but another consideration has been just doing that for illumos or something.
Probably going to just end up running Debian, in all likelihood until a BSD or illumos is available that is little-endian.
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That's probably wise. I have a soft spot for minority operating systems. Those tend to be dominated by, what they have hardware available to do, and what their maintainers are interested in supporting.
In a past life, I expressed an interest in FreeBSD. The opinionated CTO (at a startup) shot that down pretty quickly on the grounds that I needed to have what their core contributors were using as daily drivers for it to be useful as a desktop OS. Which is fair.
FreeBSD has also had a stigma stated in the past by co-founder Jordan Hubbard of supporting hardware platforms that aren't "genuinely relevant in terms of mass appeal" (YouTube link, 2014). Not a problem for a platform like Linux with many heads, many hands floating around the space, where support for minority platforms comes with corporate sponsorships and a bigger community of volunteers.
Whether those factors work for or against POWER9 and 10, I don't know exactly. It sounds like they're some ways away from solid GPU support for OpenPOWER platforms.
Debian's nice. I'll probably give Fedora a try sometime down the road. If a smaller OS can be convinced that OpenPOWER is worthwhile, that'd be great.
--- Quote from: q66 on November 30, 2019, 05:41:00 pm ---besides, i see no reason to kill off older hardware that still serves its purpose perfectly fine for many people - doing otherwise just reeks of planned obsolescence
there's a sizeable community of people running older ppc machines who often couldn't afford buying a blackbird or whatever in the first place
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Indeed. From a hobbyist PoV, the first computer I bought without borrowing credit was an old, beat up Macintosh Quadra to help learn the ins and outs of a system. I didn't have to worry about breakages from system updates, nor did I have to worry about accidentally junking the system when the whole shebang cost less than $50 to replace.
I'd say that basing your product roadmap off of yesterday's baggage isn't the wisest. However, if the only person really pushing to do the porting work for (XXX) OS gratis happens to do so because they really love their AmigaOnes. And nobody else is stepping up to that plate? Well, we can't be surprised with the outcomes.
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