Topics

1

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 40 is officially released!

« on: April 23, 2024, 09:29:08 am »

More info: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-40/

The F40 brings GNOME 46 and Linux kernel 6.8.7. Chromium RPM package is officially supported.

IMHO it is probably the best version for my blackbird till date. All sluggish gfx regression of mutter is gone, everything runs pretty snappy.

amdgpu works out of the box (well the only thing that does not work is no HDMI signal which does not impact me much as I am using DisplayPort)

There are a bit bugs with certain apps for example GNOME Loupe could not open image file.

2

Applications and Porting / [DEV] wasmtime is a porting blocker for many rust-based apps

« on: April 22, 2024, 05:55:20 pm »

Rustlang-based apps have emerged as the most trendy language/tech choice for Linux apps lately.

Because of lacking of ppc64le backend in wasmtime, many popuilar apps such as Zed text editor, DenoJS could not be ported to ppc64le. There was a report from lleabout (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/1183) in the past but it did not produce any result yet.

If any member who could take on the work, I am more than happy to crowd source a bounty to reward for their efforts.

3

Operating Systems and Porting / Tobias is working on porting GNU HURD to POWER9

« on: January 11, 2024, 08:37:11 pm »

Ref: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2023-10/msg00021.html

I have not used this OS and unlikely would use it as main driver however it's good to know a purist OSS OS is still alive.

4

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 39 is here!

« on: November 07, 2023, 05:17:02 pm »

Ref: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-39/

It is probably one of the best distro for ppc64le as of 2023

5

Blackbird / Need help with troubleshooting failed to boot issue

« on: November 06, 2023, 09:49:54 pm »

I posted a video outlining the issue I have with my blackbird at https://youtu.be/8r1HVoI3_8g?si=NhNTnHAdR-HJLJit

TL;DR; 2 days ago my old PSU died. So I replaced it with a new PSU
and now my motherboard refuse to power up.

Any help is greatly appreciated

6

General OpenPOWER Discussion / POWER11 on the horizon?

« on: October 19, 2023, 05:43:15 pm »

According to the article on Phoronix (ref: https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-PowerPC-Future-POWER11) it's seems to me the bunch of PowerPC-future patches could be that of next revision of PowerISA and likely that of POWER11.

7

Applications and Porting / [DEV] The rust-ring library has finally got ppc64le build!!

« on: October 01, 2023, 05:17:15 am »

The PR 3 years in the making has finally got merged into the main trunk!

Ref: https://github.com/briansmith/ring/pull/1057

The ring library is widely used by many rust-based projects. Having the upstream support ppc64le is a major milestone! I cannot wait to get DenoJS to support ppc64le

8

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] Quake 3 source port with Vulkan renderer (vkQuake3)

« on: September 21, 2023, 05:56:00 am »

This is yet another source port for Quake 3 and considered one of the best Vulkan renderer port out there.



I am happy that the author has finally accepted my Pull Request to make it compile for ppc64le

https://github.com/suijingfeng/vkQuake3/pull/18

9

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 39 Beta

« on: September 19, 2023, 05:20:33 pm »

It’s that time of the year again.

https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-39-beta/

Fedora 39 is now Beta. Please have a go at it and report and any issue in Bugzilla

10

Applications and Porting / [DEV] An attempt to package chromium for ppc64le in the official Fedora DNF repo

« on: September 10, 2023, 09:07:01 am »

EDIT: Than Ngo of Red Hat has cherry-picked all ppc64le patches into the main trunk. Now we officially have chromium for Fedora 40 or newer!

URL https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/chromium/pull-request/37 *STILL WORK IN PROGRESS*

The last time I was successful at getting Chromium up and running in Fedora is 3 years ago. That was version 88. Now Chromium has reached version 117.

This weekend I've spent a bit of time to adapt Timothy Pearson's patchset from Debian deb package for the official chromium Fedora RPM. So far I could get the whole application compiled and running HOWEVER the browser get into SIGSEGV or SIGTRAP with web pages that has JavaScript. So I speculate this might be related to the V8 engine.

The error outputs in the console is not so much helpful:

Code: [Select]

[1961086:1961086:0910/235841.808221:ERROR:CONSOLE(1)] "Uncaught SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: /([^\s]+?)\(([\s\S]*)\)/: Maximum call stack size exceeded", source: chrome://resources/polymer/v3_0/polymer/polymer_bundled.min.js (1)
[0910/235911.891648:ERROR:check.cc(298)] Check failed: false. NOTREACHED log messages are omitted in official builds. Sorry!
[0911/000357.201831:ERROR:check.cc(298)] Check failed: false. NOTREACHED log messages are omitted in official builds. Sorry!

I also attempt to gdb and could not find any useful backtrace (NOTE: I manually commented out all `strip` symbols in the build spec file).

The full log out when trying to open a webpage https://gist.github.com/runlevel5/3c85515c521ebcfb6ca65e4697b6b1d1

Any idea how to get more logs out of V8 in Chromium?

11

General Hardware Discussion / A promo video from IBM boasting its new Power10-based E1080 server

« on: September 08, 2023, 06:08:44 am »

Everything, I mean every single component has redundancy. Plus it runs the super fast IBM Power10 CPU!

It's surely unaffordable for us pro-consumers but hey we all can dream one day Raptor come out with a Power10 workstation/

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZdsWebj9Jw

12

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.5

« on: August 27, 2023, 06:08:10 pm »

It's finally out! https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-65-features

Unfortunately it does not have much changes related to OpenPOWER. One change with Power10 is DEXCR Support In and that's pretty much it

13

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] dosbox-staging -- one of the best choice for DOS gaming

« on: August 25, 2023, 07:34:58 am »

We all have heard about the JIT patch of our fellow member ClassicHasClass for the original dosbox which could be found here https://www.talospace.com/2020/01/dosbox-jit-on-ppc64le-and-how-you-can.html
His patch though not apply cleanly to the dosbox SVN trunk, however with a bit of tweak, it still work perfectly with PCPBENCH reports 28.3fps!!

Another fork of dosbox is dosbox-staging that supports PPC64LE JIT out of the box (again thanks to ClassicHasClass) is another great option but performance is not as good as that of patched JIT dosbox. The PCPBENCH can get up to 17.1fps
(ref: https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/commits/main/src/cpu/core_dynrec/risc_ppc64le.h)

I am going to dig in the source code of dosbox-staging to see how they did the PPC64LE JIT and why it is slower


EDIT: Great thanks to ClassicHasClass for the Pull Request https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/pull/2828

Now dosbox-staging can achieve 41 fps!

14

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] Can box64 run x86_64 Linux and Windows games?

« on: August 22, 2023, 07:59:32 am »

It's good to know Box64 0.24 has already supported PPC64LE.

I am curious to see how it would be able to run x86_64 titles. Firstly lets compile the app:

Code: [Select]

git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64.git
cd box64
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -PPC64LE=1 -DPAGE64K=ON
make -j32
sudo make install

NOTE: I am running Fedora 40 (rawhide) which we all know use 64K Pagesize, hence the PAGE64K is enabled.

15

General Discussion / Highpoint SSD7202 - M.2 NVME RAID card

« on: August 19, 2023, 09:04:06 pm »

Souce: https://www.highpoint-tech.com/nvme2/ssd7202

This card is around $300 USD and supporting 2 x NVME M.2. From what I know, it does not offer any binary driver / softwares for ppc64le so I have submit a Support Ticket with Highpoint to find out more details if there are open source driver in the upstream Linux kernel and how well they support ppc64le architecture.

Wondering if anyone has tried this Highpoint card?