Messages

1

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: September 24, 2022, 04:02:16 pm »

Thanks for all your suggestions and discussions here!

I have handed-over the hardware now 10 days ago and want to keep the recipient unpublished for privacy reasons.

2

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: August 27, 2022, 05:32:03 pm »

Update:

I have the following requests on my personal short list and would be interested to know your opinions (please don't blame me if I decide for the "wrong" party then ;-)

The order is as the requests dropped into may mailbox (NOT a prioritisation).

1. Debian Germany to use it to set up an additional build server and porterbox for Debian using PowerKVM for PowerPC big-endian Debian ports.

    Currently there are only two servers for that (one in Moscow and one in Oregon. However, the former
    machine is currently offline and it's not sure whether it will be able to return online and
    the second machine is just a loaner machine from a big company which we eventually have to return to
    them. Both machines are POWER8, getting a faster POWER9 machine would be nice.

    -> No need to cite repos for this our course...

2. QEMU/KVM PPC maintenance, U-boot/BMC firmware, skiboot, OpenPower firmware development.

    A well-known and active [non-Debian] developer with proven git activities for ppc64le wants to use the hardware.

   His actively contacted a Debian member to ask how Debian could also use the machine later when hosted (proposed TTN for that: https://www.tetaneutral.net/).
   Is OzLabs member (https://lists.ozlabs.org/listinfo) where most of the HW PPC related development happens.
   OzLabs could use the machine too once hosted (so that it has a sufficient workload).
   Cited repos (I do not want the dev name here but I know it of course!):

   * QEMU, PPC maintainer, Aspeed (BMC) machine maintainer
     https://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=tree

   * Linux
     https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/

   * U-boot firmware
     git://git.denx.de/u-boot.git

   * OpenPOWER firmware
     https://github.com/open-power/skiboot/


3.  Make videos and doing programming with it. 

     An anonymous requester (with zero hits on google) mentions the "netbsd foundation" and wants to get the machine.
     Links only to a twitter post: https://twitter.com/Southside_Sltns/status/1563189635789905922

Any helpful opinions welcome!

3

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: August 18, 2022, 01:22:11 pm »

I can host this machine in our data center in Germany if it is used for development of libre software on PPC.

I love the idea of hosting it in the EU since currently I have found only ppc64(le/el) machines outside of the EU (mainly USA and Brazil), eg.

https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi

How would the process for getting access to the hosted machine look like (and how much transparency could about the real machine usage could you provide)?

And who is paying the admin and power bills then?

4

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: August 09, 2022, 03:32:23 pm »

And to start with first proposals myself:

- Void Linux (https://voidlinux.org/)
- Chimera Linux (https://chimera-linux.org/): A new distribution

The Power 9 parts of both distros were/are heavily backed by q66 (known from this forum)...

5

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: August 09, 2022, 03:27:31 pm »

Due to lack of time I am intending to donate my Blackbird motherboard incl. the CPU (8 core) + cooling tower to an open source project or committed open source developer.

If

• you are interested and you think it will help you (without reselling it ;-) or
• want to suggest/nominate an open source project or developer

please answer to this post.

Important restriction: I can ship it only within the EU (European Union) since I do not want to go through all the trouble of customs declaration again...

6

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

« on: May 15, 2022, 10:15:46 am »

Ubuntu is using more and more snap instead of deb packages.

Firefox seems to be available only as snap now in 22.04 so if you uninstall snap(d) you no longer can install Firefox easily :-(

7

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] NVIDIA open sources their driver (from Turin onward)

« on: May 15, 2022, 10:05:27 am »

A good article about how NVIDIA is "achieving" the open source driver is here (sorry, in German only, but somewhere I also saw an English article):

https://www.golem.de/news/linux-nvidias-grosse-schoene-open-source-schummelei-2205-165301.html

8

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] GitLab Release CLI will have binary for ppc64le

« on: September 23, 2021, 05:13:10 am »

That are good news! And in their release notes they mention it too (and it is part of the free edition):

https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/09/22/gitlab-14-3-released/#gitlab-runner-on-ibm-power9-linux-os

9

General OpenPOWER Discussion / FYI: OpenPower and BMC presentations at FOSDEM 2021 conference (online + slides)

« on: February 07, 2021, 03:12:06 am »

I just saw some interesting presentations at the FOSDEM 2021 conference (available online), see:

- https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/track/openpower/
- https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/track/open_source_firmware_bmc_and_bootloader/

The conference takes place right now, sorry for posting last-minute here!

10

User Zone / Re: Blackbird: Booting from NVMe SSD sometimes disables SATA HDD and BluRay drive

« on: December 18, 2020, 03:34:23 pm »

The big question though, I have had my blackbird since I think August 2019 and never did try connecting any kind of optical drive other than via USB. Could it be that it's just my board, its production run or a design flaw in the controller itself?

It was me who opened this thread and my Blackbird was RMA'ed and is still waiting to be reassembled again (shame on me but I simply had no time so far).

I had quite similar problems but my system did finally not even boot without any drive attached.

I will try to reassemble my system in the next three weeks with the same configuration as in my first post in this thread and see if I can boot with an optical drive attached via SATA (Asus).

Hopefully this is not a design flaw. I will report my results here...

BTW: Did you already try to enable the "cold restart" setting (I don't remember the exact name but it re-initializes the complete hardware when restarting like a real power-on boot phase). There is some documentation in somewhere here and in the wiki

11

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: kernel config: page size 4k vs 64k

« on: September 15, 2020, 01:16:15 am »

Most distributions have chosen the 4k page size for their kernels on Intel architectures.

The btrfs developers recently started a patch that allows the systems with 64k page size to read a btrfs volume with 4k sectorsize.  It only works in one direction and it is read-only.

You are mentioning the kernel "memory" page size (`getconf PAGESIZE") and the `btrfs` file system page size.

Just to understand this issue right:

How is this related? Does `btrfs` by default (or always?) use the same file system page size as the kernel does for the memory page size?

12

User Zone / Re: Working xorg.conf for nouveau driver for a NVIDIA graphics card?

« on: September 14, 2020, 01:47:20 pm »

I tried putting a Quadro K2200 into my Talos II.
...
Xorg.0.log shows that the nouveau driver loads but it fails to initialize

May this problem possibly be related to the 4K page size issue you mentioned in another post (https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php/topic,200.0.html)?

13

Applications and Porting / Re: RStudio desktop working on Raptor's power computer (ppc64le)?

« on: September 14, 2020, 01:35:46 pm »

Did you have any luck with RStudio?

I also use both R and RStudio and I'm likely to try it in on this platform very shortly

I had no time so far to re-assemble my new workstation with the new planar :-(
So I still need some more time to test RStudio (Server)... (the bug was fixed BTW)

14

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: testing a new machine, memory test, etc

« on: September 07, 2020, 02:05:26 pm »

What burn-in test routines do people use when making a new machine or modifying the machine substantially?
essible in petitboot.

I personally love the `stress-ng` tool (you can vary the args as needed):

Code: [Select]

# CPU, sync and memory load simultanously:
sudo stress --cpu 4 --io 3 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 256M --timeout 20s

stress-ng – is an updated version of the stress workload generator tool which tests your
system for following features:

1. CPU compute
2. drive stress
3. I/O syncs
4. Pipe I/O
5. cache thrashing
6. VM stress
7. socket stressing
8. process creation and termination
9. context switching properties

# https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/stress-ng
# https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/stress-test-linux-unix-server-with-stress-ng/

# sudo apt install stress
# sudo apt install stress-ng

# use stress-ng instead of stress for a newer stress test

sudo stress --cpu 32

# to messure the avg load use
uptime
sudo stress --cpu 32 --timeout 60s
uptime

# use -v for verbose output

# Memory/RAM:
# Watch out: Will swap if vm-bytes >= RAM size (very slow)
# "verify" also checks if the memory can be read
sudo stress-ng --vm 1 --vm-bytes 64G --timeout 90s --verify -v --metrics-brief

# Should I run stess-ng with root access?
# Running stress-ng with root privileges will adjust out of memory settings on Linux systems to make the stressors unkillable
# in low memory situations, so use this judiciously.
# -> may be required to test the RAM completely

15

Firmware / Re: swapping flash chips, ordering spares

« on: September 07, 2020, 01:52:48 pm »

Has anybody seen any useful video that shows the correct way to remove the chip?

I have found a video here but never tried it:

How to remove a SPI flash chip ("BIOS") from the motherboard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEcvVWcdXk0

If you look at my pic in the prev post you can see that the planar uses sockets for the chips which support easily replace them...