Messages

61

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 37 has arrived!

« on: March 10, 2023, 07:28:56 pm »

My Fedora install has developed a wrinkle in the past couple of days. On running sudo dnf update, I receive the following message:

Code: [Select]

Last metadata expiration check: 1:23:53 ago on Fri 10 Mar 2023 06:02:42 PM CST.
Dependencies resolved.

 Problem: The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: systemd, systemd-udev
====================================================================================================
 Package                         Architecture      Version                  Repository         Size
====================================================================================================
Skipping packages with conflicts:
(add '--best --allowerasing' to command line to force their upgrade):
 systemd                         ppc64le           251.7-611.fc37           fedora            4.3 M
 systemd                         ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           4.3 M
 systemd-libs                    ppc64le           251.7-611.fc37           fedora            652 k
 systemd-libs                    ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           652 k
 systemd-pam                     ppc64le           251.7-611.fc37           fedora            355 k
 systemd-pam                     ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           354 k
 systemd-rpm-macros              noarch            251.7-611.fc37           fedora             30 k
 systemd-rpm-macros              noarch            251.13-5.fc37            updates            29 k
Skipping packages with broken dependencies:
 systemd-container               ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           556 k
 systemd-devel                   ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           578 k
 systemd-networkd                ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           614 k
 systemd-oomd-defaults           noarch            251.13-5.fc37            updates            25 k
 systemd-resolved                ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           284 k
 systemd-udev                    ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           1.9 M
 systemd-udev                    ppc64le           251.7-611.fc37           fedora            1.9 M

Transaction Summary
====================================================================================================
Skip  15 Packages

Packages unrelated to these install fine, but these are invariant and inflexible in failing to install. It appears that somehow I've entered dependency hell, as attempting to run sudo dnf update -- results in this:

Code: [Select]

Error:
 Problem: The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: gnome-shell, grub2-ppc64le, systemd-udev

It suggests using --skip-broken to skip uninstallable packages, but that makes no difference. I don't think I did anything novel, so maybe something scabby got pushed in a package that's throwing things off. Any suggestions? I can probably limp this along as-is until the April-ish release of Fedora 38...

Edit: manually installing systemd-251.7 went without a hitch. The changelog for 251.13-5 indicates some dependencies were changed to prevent an edge case, but I’m guessing it’s causing other issues as well. So it’s likely that I can just wait a few days and this problem will go away by itself.

62

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 19, 2023, 09:10:38 pm »

Only two weeks? Wow!
And everything working now?

Yes, I'm honestly a little shocked. They were great about communicating with me, and I've been pleased as punch that a replacement came in, I moved everything to a newer case with better cable management, and it all just... came right back up.

63

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 19, 2023, 02:01:04 am »

And we're back. Hello!

64

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Intel Arc A770 - failed experiment

« on: February 09, 2023, 03:33:22 pm »

Out of morbid curiosity, has there been any movement for Intel GPUs on ppc64le since the last update?

edit: Checking the PCIe compatibility list on the Wiki, it looks like it fails to compile. Guess we'll wait for the Xe driver before we try again...

65

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 07, 2023, 06:01:39 pm »

Thanks again. I sent my motherboard off today - now I wait for the RMA.

66

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 05, 2023, 10:36:21 am »

You also could give me your ticket number. I could post it on Twitter.

Thank you - I deleted my account there recently. My ticket number is #493290.

67

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 04, 2023, 08:45:58 pm »

That definitely qualifies. Haven't gotten an update on the support ticket I placed a week ago, so I believe I'll give them a call on Monday.

68

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: January 30, 2023, 11:55:16 am »

I agree this sounds hardware-related. Haven't seen anything like that on my own Blackbird, though it did have to get RMAed because the BMC video went bananas.

Define "bananas." Mine would very occasionally have some kind of issue where the BMC would either fail to output video, or would output garbled video that was illegible. The only solution to those was to turn the machine off, turn the power supply off, wait a few seconds, then allow the BMC to fully reinitialize. That would fix it.

69

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: January 29, 2023, 06:39:12 pm »

Update: problem appears to have spread, no matter which SATA ports I use X11 doesn’t successfully initialize the Radeon any more. Putting in an RMA request with Raptor - we’ll see what they say.

70

Blackbird / SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: January 28, 2023, 04:54:41 pm »

I purchased a PCIe to NVMe adapter, cloned the contents of my SATA SSD to the new drive on a different machine, installed the NVMe drive with my existing Fedora 37 install... and the new drive wouldn't boot past initializing the Radeon in my Blackbird. So, resigned to the incompatibility, I removed the NVMe drive, set up the SATA SSD again, and booted, only to see a new error appear in my Petitboot loader, kAFS not found, with an error code of -97. Booting afterward proceeds normally, up until the Radeon is initialized for the login screen, at which point the display signal gets flaky and visible artifacting occurs intermittently. Shutting the system down afterward proceeds more or less normally, as far as I can tell.

The issue appears to be limited to SATA0 and SATA1 - I can boot the machine normally from SATA2 or SATA3. I am genuinely flummoxed here - does anyone have any insight?

71

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake II RTX!

« on: January 23, 2023, 07:39:40 pm »

Ah, thanks for that. I've been toying with getting a new GPU, and maybe this is what pushes me over the edge. Do you have the firmware loaded for Petitboot?

I do not - never got an answer for which subset of Radeon firmware should be loaded, so I have the BMC’s video going to HDMI2, then toggle over to DisplayPort for the Radeon.

No multiplayer yet - my twitch skills are mostly intact, but I’d have to find servers!

72

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake II RTX!

« on: January 23, 2023, 10:46:26 am »

have you tried playing it with SMT disabled? i'm curious if theres a performance difference.

I wouldn’t expect much - Quake II’s CPU demands are trivial. I genuinely think the Ogg Vorbis support for music playback would dwarf the demands of the game itself. Running Q2RTX with the OpenGL renderer reliably nets between 920-1000 fps on my config at 4K!

The overwhelming share of the computational grunt needed will be demanded of the GPU itself. I expect any weird stuttering to be down to things like vsync being enabled by some part of the display stack despite what Q2RTX expects, or similar issues. Out of curiosity how do you configure or disable SMT? I’ve been meaning to try it in order to determine its impact on some other titles, chief among them GZDoom…

73

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake II RTX!

« on: January 22, 2023, 03:12:14 pm »

The game was complaining about "Could not load library gamex86.so" so what I did is I copy my `gameppc64le.so` to `gamex86.so`. Not the best way but I could not find much details how the game workout the library filename.

Ack! I forgot to mention that step. I could’ve sworn mine compiled to gamex86_64.so, but I copied the file to gamex86.so and then it didn’t give me any hassle.

@tle, also being a Fedoran, which card and which kernel (I'm currently on 6.1.6)?

I’m running on 6.1.6 with an XFX Radeon RX 6600, though it also worked with kernel 6.1.5. Both have worked with Fedora’s current Mesa release. Reported framerate didn’t necessarily correlate to onscreen framerate, though it did become more consistent when vsync was enabled. It’ll be interesting to see how this improves as time goes on.

74

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake II RTX!

« on: January 21, 2023, 03:45:46 pm »

should I wait for the intel arc gpu drivers over AMD? i've wanted to play this since it came out and I'd rather wait for power9 support to play it. I might opt for an a770 gpu over an AMD card if it plays well. Maybe a bit off topic but should one even trust an intel gpu moreso over an amd/nvidia lol..?

In x86_64 land Intel’s the gold standard for open video drivers - hassle-free, exposed features that work without too much fuss, and as well-behaved as the hardware’s capabilities allow. They’re at an inflection point now that xe is being forked from i915 to provide dedicated support for 12th Gen and Arc hardware, but they have a funded and capable driver team and it’ll probably come up pretty fast. I can’t tell you where to spend your money, but once Arc has become a going concern on ppc64le I’m planning to swap the RX 6600 into my Windows machine so the Arc can be in my Blackbird. The video encoding is stupid good - if I can get OBS working, that’ll make everything from Blu-Ray transcoding to desktop capture overwhelmingly nicer on the platform for me.

75

General Hardware Discussion / Re: Could Intel DG2 the missing piece of the puzzle for ppc64le workstation?

« on: January 18, 2023, 07:26:19 pm »

Per Phoronix, it looks like Intel's preparing to merge new DRM code for its xe driver fork from the i915 driver. This driver's being brought up on both x86_64 and aarch64 to ensure broad platform compatibility. It may be a while before the driver's well-tuned, but it sounds like they've been smart to promote its 12th gen video and Arc cards to a new driver infrastructure... and I'm very much looking forward to playing with Intel's great H.264/H.265/AV1 encoder on Power.