Messages

1

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 28, 2026, 06:15:41 pm »

> Will this merged to next 153esr?

That's the plan. I am fixing the PPC64 Simulator on ARM64 now so the Firefox team could run the PPC64 JIT tests on their CI.

2

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 44 officially released!

« on: April 28, 2026, 06:13:58 pm »

ref: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-44-Released

> Fedora 44 ships live media improvements, enhanced AArch64 EFI system support for Windows on ARM laptops, the latest GCC 16 compiler, and many other updates like LLVM 22. Fedora 44 also has Budgie 10.10, PHP 8.5, Ruby 4.0, Boost 1.90, Golang 1.26, CMake 4.0, and more for delivering a leading-edge upstream Linux experience.

Yet another release. I've been testing Fedora 44 since the beta release and till now I could not any issue with the blackbird.

3

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Adding support for POWER SIMD in ispc lib

« on: April 26, 2026, 06:36:17 pm »

I am working on the Firefox JIT atm so once that's done I will re-visit this work to start filling them out incrementally.

4

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 26, 2026, 06:35:09 pm »

@carlosgonz https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox/releases/tag/alpha

5

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 25, 2026, 11:38:14 pm »

Good work picking it up. Unfortunately I'm having trouble with Fedora on my Blackbird (won't DHCP through my wifi bridge), so I can't really check it right now, but I've been following the commits as they land.

Looking forward to your feedback in the Pull Request. I will freeze the codes when Firefox team cut the 151 release then proceed with upstreaming

6

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 25, 2026, 11:09:52 pm »

@carlosgonz I mean yes I could package the LE binary (built on Fedora 44). Btw I have not tested against Debian so unsure if the package would work or not (in theory it should)

7

Applications and Porting / [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 22, 2026, 10:59:24 pm »

Firstly, all credits go to @ClassicHasClass for his great JIT support work for the v86 Firefox (basically baseline JIT is fully working). He had submitted the patches against upstream at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860412 but unfortunately the patch has become stale and no longer work with post-140ESR codebase.

So after spending 3 weeks with help from few people in the PPC community and help of AI agents to track down errors pattern (lacking of tooling like rr-debugger made the work super hard - at one stage I was resolving to all sort of blind hypothesis and nearly gave up), I have successfully revived and fixed number of bugs of the original JIT codes. Please check out https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox/pull/1 to all members here for reviewing.

TL;DR; LE path for POWER8, POWER9 and POWER10 is fully implemented (including ION JIT, WASM SIMD, JSPI and Simulator). The BE path and POWER10 optimization are still in progress atm. Please give JIT work a go and let me know if you happen to find any bug. I have tried my best to hand test and ran many stress test / benchmarks and have addressed quite a number of edge cases.

So what's next? Trying to get it polished as much as possible then get it upstreamed (for release 153 - why? new ESR would be branched off this version) or simply try to get the patch accepted in downstream sources like Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu.

8

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] LuaJIT PPC64 support

« on: April 22, 2026, 09:13:46 pm »

It's painful to convince Mike to review and merge such huge delta of changes to support PPC64 JIT. It's understandable taking into consideration and assumption that Mike does not own a POWER8/9 hardware.

I think I could try to review one of those stale JIT work and get it patched downstream in Fedora. If that approach proves successful, I strongly believe Mike would likely give his blessing to the JIT port after few years of real world usage downstream.

9

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Linux 7.0

« on: April 12, 2026, 07:49:16 pm »

I've just manually built the kernel for Fedora 44 (as of now Fedora has not yet, likely they are going to stick to 6.19 for the F44 release). So far no issue, everything just work for me. Having said that I do not run DB, web server or NAS on the blackbird system so I could not verify if there are regressions to those applications

10

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 7.0

« on: April 12, 2026, 06:20:30 pm »

More information: https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges

Key highlights from the Linux 7.0 changelog include:

File Systems:

* XFS: Introduction of autonomous self-healing capabilities.
* EXT4: Enhanced performance for concurrent direct I/O writes.
* Performance & Memory:
* Faster swap mechanisms.
* Improved memory reclamation for file caches.
* Standardized generic I/O handling.

Architecture & Security:

* Intel TSX optimizations.
* Quantum-resistant kernel module signing.

Language Support:

* The Rust language experiment is considered complete and is now a core, non-experimental part of the kernel.

Hardware Support:

*General improvements and support for new hardware devices


POWERPC
kdump: Add support for crashkernel CMA reservation
powernv: Enable cpuidle state detection for POWER11
book3s64: Hash / SLB fixes & improvements (cover)
smp: Expose die_id and die_cpumask

11

Applications and Porting / Re: Little Snitch for Linux!

« on: April 11, 2026, 11:07:15 pm »

Isn't it the popular firewall for OSX? I fondly remember then it was quite good

12

Applications and Porting / Re: Firefox WebAssembly (WASM) on ppc64le? Jitsi Meet, Zoom, etc not working

« on: April 01, 2026, 11:52:32 pm »

I am going to try to make his JIT work run again on the newer version - still in progress. I will NOT touch the WASM in this work

ref: https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox/pull/1

READY for testing:

* Ion JIT
* WASM
* WASM SIMD
* POWER9 Optimization

Basically it is on par with ARM64 backend

13

Applications and Porting / Re: RustiCL on Fedora 39

« on: March 30, 2026, 05:47:25 pm »

It's been awhile, perhaps you should give it another a go

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RadeonSI-Modern-CL-Conformance

14

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Unvanquished is now fully open-sourced

« on: March 30, 2026, 05:29:53 pm »

Another progress with supporting NaCl sandboxing feature

https://github.com/DaemonEngine/Daemon/pull/1946

That is to use box64 emulation

15

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] UT99, UTGOLD, UT2004 on native PPC64LE!

« on: March 29, 2026, 05:15:35 pm »

You are right, the game is indeed not CPU bound. It's not clear to me if OldUnreal team has any plan to add Vulkan renderer for UT2004.