Messages

16

Blackbird / Re: Issue with blackbird booting with GPU

« on: September 11, 2022, 04:10:18 pm »

FWIW, I have a WX 7100 (similar to RX 580) with no firmware in BOOTKERNFW (I just use the HDMI output for booting) and I can fast reboot multiple times with no GPU issues. I also thought I read things in the past about some AMD GPUs not liking being hot reset - this was mostly in the context of VFIO GPU passthrough, but I would imagine it would be similar here.

17

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: PCI Power State Management

« on: September 11, 2022, 03:59:29 pm »

Thanks for pointing me towards those documents. Unfortunately, it seems the behavior I observed is intended: on page 189 of the PHB4 spec, the PM config field is set to be read-only and only ever return D0.

I also checked the PHB4 code in Skiboot and it seems they explicitly added a check to block writes just to that config field. I'm hoping it's just a case of them not having a reason to implement it, and not it actually just being impossible...

18

Operating Systems and Porting / PCI Power State Management

« on: September 10, 2022, 10:08:03 pm »

Has anyone managed to get their PCIE devices to enter a low-power state?

I've been trying to figure out if adding suspend support to blackbird / talos systems is possible, so I've been doing some digging into getting that working. The first step would be to get s2idle working, but in addition to not being able to wake the system once it enters s2idle, I also see my kernel logs get filled with lines like:

Code: [Select]

amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: refused to change power state from D0 to D3hot
That happens for a lot of other PCI devices as well, not just the GPU. I'm wondering if that has something to do with why no wakeup sources are working.

I looked into kernel sources a bit and saw that the power state is set through a PCI config space write. It seems like those writes just get ignored, though. I even tried using the setpci command to set it manually:

Code: [Select]

sudo setpci -v -s 0004:01:00.2 CAP_PM+4.b=bI also just tried 3 instead of 0x08 | 0x03 = 0xb but that still does nothing, not even anything in dmesg.

The last thing I was able to dig up was this line from the OPAL documentation:

phb4 doesn’t support ASB config space writes

I tried looking up what those acronyms mean - phb4 is the PCIE controller for POWER9, but I have no idea what an ASB is. Does anyone know if that might be the issue here?

19

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Petite boot and encrypting /boot

« on: September 06, 2022, 09:18:01 pm »

I know this thread is a bit old, but I figured I'd share how I managed to get cryptsetup working properly in petitboot. It does require custom firmware right now, though.

First, the firmware kernel is missing modules needed for decrypting LUKS volumes. Attached is a patch to add all of the possible cryptography configurations needed to the kernel config, based on blackbird-op-build. If you know the algorithms used for your specific setup, you can trim down some of the algorithms you don't need. You can also run "cryptsetup benchmark" in petitboot to test things - if it says "N/A" instead of a number, it's not working.

Also, I'm not sure if this is true or not, but the cryptsetup version shipped in the current firmware might not support LUKS2 headers - the output of the newer versions mention LUKS2 while the firmware version doesn't. I ended up updating that to the latest version as I thought that might have been the problem before I investigated the kernel config. Another patch is attached for that. There is also a change to point the lvm2 sources to sourceware.org instead of sources.redhat.com, as the latter seems to be down (?). If that's not the case, feel free to remove that as well.

I am a complete novice at using patches for git, so please let me know if I messed something up.

20

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Arctic Tern user manual posted

« on: July 28, 2022, 03:14:31 pm »

Not only that, it seems like Arctic Tern itself was launched - https://raptorcs.com/content/AT1PC2/intro.html
(module and carrier card also sold separately, the link is to the bundle)

Interested to see what people do with it!

21

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: July 13, 2022, 01:07:56 pm »

Going on a bit over 2 years since I ordered my Blackbird, haven't heard anything yet. Hopefully they didn't forget about me 

Glad others are finally getting theirs though!

22

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: July 01, 2021, 11:31:04 am »

So I did get a response from Raptor (thank you for the help with that), this is what they said:

... we have not been wanting to give a date only to have it pushed back again as the latest supply chain cut or manufacturing delay happens. That said, we have a *tentative* in-stock date of August 2021 at this point, without any known blockers that would delay it further.

So there's some good news at least, with it (hopefully) only being a few months away. I've waited this long, so I might as well wait a bit longer

23

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: June 30, 2021, 07:02:55 pm »

You're welcome.
https://twitter.com/mpc7500v2/status/1410334278186160136

Yes, Blackbird has audio, SATA and HDMI. But the number of PCIe slots are equal.

Thank you . And when I was referencing the slots, I meant that since the Blackbird has built-in audio and SATA, I wouldn't need cards for that, so I would have 1 spare PCIe slot instead of being 1 short. I probably should have been more clear about that. Not to mention the optional SAS/SATA addon has closed firmware according to the wiki, which while the disks themselves would all have closed firmware anyway, I'm trying to avoid as much as possible.

Here you will find a comparison of the different mainboards:
https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/RCS_Platform_Comparison

That's a handy little comparison chart. That kind of stuff is very helpful, not sure if that exact page is one I saw but the wiki was super helpful for me back when I placed my order. It's a shame though, if the T2 Lite had either of the Blackbird's integrated components, I could make some room and get that instead (if it wasn't backordered, that is).

24

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: June 30, 2021, 03:15:09 pm »

To be honest, I would change the order to a Talos-II lite. I don't think they will have the Blackbird back in stock quickly.
Price-wise, it hardly makes a difference. But you need a bigger case, of course, unfortunately.

I just double-checked the T2 lite specs and in addition to the case size, which is a bit annoying but probably workable with a case like you suggested, there were a couple of other Blackbird-specific features I wanted (mostly to reuse hardware I already have):

• On-board audio output
• SATA Ports

So assuming I also wanted to add a GPU, getting equivalent features would probably require 3 slots, but the T2 lite only has 2, so that is a bit of a problem.

If you can't reach anyone via support, I would try Twitter. If you don't have a Twitter account, you can give me your ticket number and I'll write to Raptor.

I don't have a Twitter account, but if you could have them look at ticket #337978 it would be much appreciated.

25

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: June 29, 2021, 09:12:36 pm »

Has anyone heard any news about when Blackbirds will be coming back in stock? I tried asking Raptor support and got not response. It's also been almost a year since I originally ordered, so I'm wondering if they will even come back at all at this point. I understand Covid probably doesn't help this situation, but I wish they kept us in the loop, even if the news isn't good

As an aside, I know the T2 Lite exists, but I was going to use this for a workstation with somewhat limited space, so having a micro ATX board is helpful. It's too late for that now anyway, since T2 Lites are backordered too...