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Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] FreeBSD 13 is out

« on: April 19, 2021, 01:28:01 pm »

FINALLY el support.

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Operating Systems and Porting / Re: FreeBSD - Unfortunately not very TALOS-focused

« on: November 17, 2020, 09:57:43 pm »

Necro'd, but as Cameron pointed out on Talospace:

https://www.talospace.com/2020/09/freebsd-swings-both-ways.html

Finally we have an el release. More motives are present for me to resume plans to buy a Talos II!

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Operating Systems and Porting / Re: FreeBSD - Unfortunately not very TALOS-focused

« on: December 18, 2019, 06:53:51 pm »

I know; but BSD on PowerPC is often a worse experience than macOS, and I'm not really a Linux user, other than for KVM hosts at the moment. No offense to any linux users of course; I hope that's made clear. If KVM worked as well on BSD or illumos I'd probably not use Linux at all.

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Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Old stuff survey

« on: December 18, 2019, 06:51:27 pm »

Not to be a (terrible) pedant, but while they do indeed implement (at least most of) the later ISA, the QorIQ e5500 microarchitecture doesn't have much in common with POWER7's. It's essentially a 64-bit e500 without the SPE crap and an FPU borrowed from the e600, itself an evolution of the 744x G4. The lack of AltiVec/VMX is a terrible omission, however, and limits its utility for general purpose computing. It's really an embedded part and meant for that application, and I have said in other places how much of a disservice I think running such CPUs in pricey desktops is to the Amiga community.

Indeed, I can't agree more. But from everything the amiga community has said; they'd rather pay for a pricy FPGA chip that's more of a novelty than a POWER9 machine like the Talos/Blackbird machines.

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Operating Systems and Porting / Re: FreeBSD - Unfortunately not very TALOS-focused

« on: December 10, 2019, 06:27:00 pm »

1080p 10-bit video works perfectly fine with no framedrops on mine (aircooled dualcore 2.3GHz) - using mpv. The bottleneck there was GPU - after putting in a more modern Radeon (currently HD4670), there are no issues. It's not loud either, unless you load it a lot. The performance seems generally alright as well. I mostly use it for testing, and occasionally I need to trigger a build job on it or something, and it handles that fine (though obviously nowhere near as fast as my POWER9 metal)

edit: just tested pure CPU decoding performance on a 10bit 1080p h264 sample, it averages at ~40FPS, which is plenty headroom for 24fps video...)

Well, my test was in macos on the last build of VLC. As I've said, I don't use Linux, and that limited my GPU selection as well. But if it works for you and you like it that's what's important. Me, they're ugly, loud and have nothing redeeming them in my eyes.

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Operating Systems and Porting / Re: FreeBSD - Unfortunately not very TALOS-focused

« on: December 09, 2019, 10:57:38 pm »

The G5s are pretty capable, especially the late 2005 PCIe ones. Up to 4 cores and 16GB RAM, can use a modern GPU with Linux, can use NVMe SSDs, USB3, and so on. The 32-bit stuff is dated, but still makes for reasonable testing machines at least (there isn't any better 32-bit PowerPC hardware out there unless you count the Wii U, which doesn't let you run mainline kernels at least yet, has no accelerated graphics drivers and has the 1 core limitation)

I've owned them, and no, they're not capable. When a low-end Nehalem desktop can blow them out of the water in terms of performance, keeping in mind you can usually get these for free, that's a problem in my eyes. If the G5 could run el kernels, I'd say it's worth supporting, but clearly Apple's inability to juggle BE and EL ports of macOS, and other things, really hobbles it.

also, G5s are loud, even the watercooled models that I've owned. Granted, according to ClassicHasClass (I sold him a G5 which sadly got banged around in shipping by FedEx) the one I sent him needed a pump rebuild. They sound like keurigs drawing in water, and they output crazy heat, can't do 2k, 10-bit video (most of the stuff I watch is anime in 10-bit) and are all around crap for anything GP—I applaud ClassicHasClass for his dedication for sure, but sadly the sacrifices he is/was able to make to run Bruce as a daily (dunno if he still does or he mostly uses the T2 he has) don't work for me.

(Note, I realize that my case isn't the necessarily perfect way, but as someone who prefers BSD or illumos, not being el on an arch prevents me from using it, this is the reason I sadly sold my SPARC64 fujitsu systems)

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Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Old stuff survey

« on: December 09, 2019, 10:50:47 pm »

I divested my apple stuff long ago, but I still have some older stuff that isn't Apple:

I picked up a Genesi EFIKA 5200B for free from a guy in MD—he was selling off his collection of amiga stuff and I helped him out with getting the best prices.

I also jointly own an AmigaOne X5000 with a friend of mine—though I told him recently he can buy me out as my one attempt to run any BSD on it failed. I lent him the money for partial ownership, but he only wants to really do AmigaOS4 with it which interests me not.

Owned up until recently a Sam460ex by Acube—sold it to pay bills when I quit my job.

Out of all of them, the Sam460ex honestly was probably my favorite. I'm gonna probably give away the Efika, since it's a slow little piece of kit that isn't even mainlined on anything but MorphOS last I checked, and I'm getting out of 32-bit hardware other than M68k stuff.

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User Zone / Re: Void Linux thread

« on: December 03, 2019, 01:09:11 am »

Neat stuff you're doing q66 for Void Power.

Aikatsu's a cute anime, I saw that in your shot. Checking the docs you have, it's not clear - does this distro have qemu-kvm support?

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Operating Systems and Porting / Re: FreeBSD - Unfortunately not very TALOS-focused

« on: December 03, 2019, 01:03:45 am »

that's kind of a bad attitude to have, considering it's largely thanks to those older systems that the ppc desktop stack is in as good of a shape as it is (IBM doesn't give a shit about anything but headless server/HPC stuff) as well as that support for the platform exists on minority OSes like freebsd at all

besides, i see no reason to kill off older hardware that still serves its purpose perfectly fine for many people - doing otherwise just reeks of planned obsolescence

there's a sizeable community of people running older ppc machines who often couldn't afford buying a blackbird or whatever in the first place

It's mostly a situation where you either hobble the new hardware, split your time between two incompatible ABIs/platforms, or you cut your losses and take the old systems off life support.

OPENPOWER is quite good as an x86 alternative, and I think with further refinements and cost reductions, especially with Raptor being the innovator, as long as they continue to turn a profit somehow, we'll see it through to have this be the new era.

I'm not a hater of old hardware. i have an SGI Onyx2 here in my office alongside many other systems - but I don't care for PowerPC macs. They're in a bad place for me - too old to do anything useful or modern with, and too new to offer any gaming potential that's unique to them or have any serious advantages over alternatives from around the same time. Not to mention a million issues I have with macOS and MorphOS - the two most common OSes for machines of that era.

Considering my Onyx2 is nearly a decade older than say a PowerMac G4 MDD and can do 4G of RAM, 4 CPUs, and more than 512M of graphics memory, it's a clear choice for me. No judgment if you enjoy those systems, of course, you do you, but I can't see the appeal. Then again, I don't "hate" windows the way some people do. I just find it boring, moreorless.

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Operating Systems and Porting / Re: FreeBSD - Unfortunately not very TALOS-focused

« on: November 30, 2019, 05:17:04 pm »

As somebody who dislikes Apple hardware and has no use for anything that is big endian in a modern work load capacity, their refusal to even consider a separate platform for little endian POWER upsets me. personally though I am always the type of person who believes that leaving behind older systems is a reasonable use case. People who are familiar with me on other forums would know that I abandoned powerpc years ago, even at one point having to destroy several powermac g5s because I couldn't pay for somebody to take them away. Living in a rural area will do that so they became tannerite targets.

I think that like with 32-bit x86, it's pretty unreasonable at this point to hold back little endian POWER because of systems that are over a decade old at this point. There are no consumer-grade PowerPC systems currently being manufactured other than the A-eon systems and you would be daft to pay $2,000 for one of those when you could already buy a blackbird for the majority of that price and have a very respectable configuration.

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Operating Systems and Porting / FreeBSD - Unfortunately not very TALOS-focused

« on: November 24, 2019, 10:15:08 pm »

I've been talking with the FreeBSD PowerPC devs, and they're unfortunately making a mistake, in my humble opinion, regarding their support for the Talos. They are not interested in either a separate little endian version, or to consider migrating their ppc64 port to little endian. It's unfortunate, as the litany of evidence that I've read on POWER is that little endian POWER will probably be the future due to big-endian.

But then again, FreeBSD has made some dumb decisions in the past. Hopefully NetBSD or OpenBSD will step up.

I've considered once I get a POWER board on doing a fork of FreeBSD for POWER64el, but another consideration has been just doing that for illumos or something.

Probably going to just end up running Debian, in all likelihood until a BSD or illumos is available that is little-endian.

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General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Ahoy shipmates!

« on: November 24, 2019, 10:09:56 pm »

Good to see RaptorCS got a forum.