Messages

1

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Using Older Radeon Cards On Talos II.

« on: January 28, 2024, 11:58:53 am »

While messing around with F39 install and my 3 input monitor and the aspeed select jumper.

Sometime ago my fancy graphics card went belly-up and I installed a old RV-730 card. Of course it required the firmware blobs installed into petitboot for it to work, being lazy, or just not finding the time to go thru the pain of doing so, I have been running the T2 on the Aspeed VGA.

Upon running F39 install I noticed the DVI input was active on my monitor when the Aspeed jumper was on. The RV-730 was active! Wow...!

I reboot and just let it go thru all the startup again, without the F39 USBstick installed. This time it booted Debian 12 on the RV-730. This is using the 6.1.0-17 kernel. Another try using 6.1.0-16 kernel failed to boot the RV-730.

Hmm. lets try another old Radeon card. So installed a HD-6850 (BARTS)
card and it also works.

Now you can not see which OS to boot without installing the firmware into petitboot,but the keyboard is active and if you count how many times you click the up arrow key you can select other than the default OS to boot. Cool.

I only run Debian, so switch-on and it boots on the old Radeons without firmware in petitboot. With the jumper on it displays the boot sequence to a certain point then the display changes to the card and I have to select the DVI input on the monitor. If I do not have the Aspeed VGA plugged in then I miss all the boot stuff on the display and the first thing I see is the GUI login screen.

Questions?
 

2

General Discussion / Re: Raptor-provided SATA card issues

« on: July 16, 2023, 08:33:24 am »

@rjzak
Yes, that's the one. Mine is older and has both SATA slots internal.
Caution; You can only use SATA or PATA, not both. But it works.

3

General Discussion / Re: Raptor-provided SATA card issues

« on: July 10, 2023, 07:54:17 am »

I,ve been using a JMicron JMB363 SATA/IDE controller (rev 2) for a couple of years now without problems.That is where my DVD drive is connected.
I also have the on-board Adaptec SATA controller that came with the Talos2.

Wish I could help.

4

User Zone / Adventure in networking

« on: November 20, 2022, 10:57:06 am »

This exercise started as a goal to setup five computers that could act as a server with the least amount of software and modification to the readily available, and perhaps already installed, applications.
    The computers;
1. Talos II 2x8 core ppc64le Debian.
2. 4 core AMD X86 Linux Mint
3. 2 core AMD x86 Linux Mint
4. Intel i7n laptop MX linux
5 RPi 3 B+ Raspian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) armv
And as a client only a TV with Web OS.

 The computers all use Apache2 for servers. I wished only to use the minimum amount of server change from their installed settings. KISS was to be the intended result for this system. This is only used as a LAN setup, but could be put on the web.

Using the installed hard drives was out as they would all need to have the same content,,,,,no KISS, so using USB sticks were selected as the medium for this adventure. I purchased a 5TB USB drive, that I may never fill to capacity, and added four folders to the drive, Videos,Pictures,Docs, and Junk. I also have a 7 port powered hub as the RPi does not have enough power to operate more than a few standard USB sticks.

Apache setup. The standard server directory is /var/www/html. By using a web browser on the same computer as apache and putting localhost in the address bar should display the apache2 default page,index.html, if everything is up and running. This default page must be moved. Then in /var/www/html you can create several folders, I used srv1,srv2,srv3,srv4.
Of course any names can be used.

The USB sticks can now be remounted to the folders in /var/www/html/srv1 or 2,3,4, by opening a terminal and using,
umount /media/username/USBvids then sudo mount /dev/disk/by-label/USBvids/ /var/www/html/srv1.
To keep things simple the USB sticks should be named with a single,no spaces, name when formatted, USB32G, USBvids, pictures, junk, etc..

CDROMs can be added to the server with  umount /dev/sr0 and sudo mount /dev/sr0 /var/www/html/srv2. This does not work with most commercial CDs. To be investigated.

If you are using a remote client on you system by entering the URL of the server (192.168.x.xx) should get you to your server data.

All my computers are Debian based systems. Fedora, Alma, Rocky, ....I don't know.

Suggestions, comments, hints are all welcome.

5

Applications and Porting / FFMPEG

« on: July 09, 2022, 12:24:41 pm »

FFMPEG
 This is what I noticed using ffmpeg on the 16 core Talos II and on a 9 year old x86 4core something or other.

I used ffmpeg first on the x86 and the file I was converting took 34+ minutes to do the work. Then I put the same file on the Talos II and, surprize surprize, it only took 34+ minutes. HUH?

I then went thru the same proceedure on both computers and this time I pulled up the system monitors. the x86 was using all 4 cores, while over on the Talos II only one core was being used with all of it's 4 slices cooking away.

Also, on the TalosII, every time I do this the cpu fan for chip0 cranks up very high. Checking with ipmitool shows that cpu0 getting up to 57 degrees and of course the other cores in that chip are hotter than usual. Whereas chip 1 is running still around 35-37 degrees as they are not doing anything.

You would think the 16 cores would destroy the 4 core x86 in a race to the finish. Is it the ffmpeg program where the brakes are dragging ?. Or is it that ffmpeg was simply dragged over from x86 and not tuned to POWER 9?

I wonder the speed of this is down at OakRridge ?

I am running the Talos II on the Aspeed VGA and wonder if having a GPU card would improve performance?

( I might give that a try)

Check this from @MauryG5 https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php/topic,364.msg2939.html#msg2939

6

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 36 is out!

« on: May 17, 2022, 11:57:26 am »

Today I downloaded and installed F36 Everything net install with no video problems. So there is 1 bug fixed. .....Takes time.

I also selected LXqt desktop. Again okay.

7

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 36 is out!

« on: May 16, 2022, 08:38:38 am »

@ClasicHasClass
Yes. The only reason I tried the upgrade path was that I could not get a working screen with the WorkStation or Server spins to install.
Their is still a Python script missing for Pycheck, but the system is working. Problems reported, maybe already fixed. It's still early.

8

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 36 is out!

« on: May 13, 2022, 12:19:12 pm »

I just posted this on TALOSPACE.
I tried to install 36. the installer would not display on either the AST or my 7750 radeon.
They were both activated, just no display.
I then installed an older copy of F35 and followed these instruction;
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-upgrade/
Now it is up and running. It is early and the only app I installed is Midnight Commander;
sudo dnf install mc. I also dislike GNOME but it comes with Gnome Classic and makes it usable for me.

Right now I'm running Mozilla listening some smooth jazz while watching old classic movies.
It works fine with 64K page size. (at least on my older Radeon.)
It's still early.

9

User Zone / Re: Radeon HD7750 working on 64K PAGESIZE.

« on: April 11, 2022, 07:24:29 am »

I guess it's time for me to wakeup and smell the coffee

10

User Zone / Re: Radeon HD7750 working on 64K PAGESIZE.

« on: April 10, 2022, 08:13:01 am »

For some time the only way my WX7100 and Radeon 7750 would work on my Talos II is if I changed the kernel to use 4k pagesize.

I had been using the AST chip for some time now, then last week I installed the 7750 and it worked. 

I don't know what, but something changed.

11

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Debian 11 is out

« on: April 10, 2022, 08:01:32 am »

I have been using Midnight Commander for so long, not only on Linux, that it has become my goto default tool for kernel building, system snooping, etc.. I build my kernels as user, and install as root as necessary.
Many times I will remove them from /boot by moving to a folder in /home along with the modules....just in case.
Different strokes for different folks.

Now that my Radeon 7750 is working with 64k pagesize there is less urgency.

12

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Debian 11 is out

« on: April 09, 2022, 08:19:37 am »

I do not make .deb packages. I also do not use make -jx, or make modules.

Pretty much I do make menuconfig, make, make modules_install, make install.

In menuconfig I change things to what I want, like 4k PAGESIZE, and for my system with 2x8 cores, I use 64 processors.

If I want I use mc (midnight commander) as root or sudo to look at /boot and perhaps remove,move, or add kernels and
other stuff and then use update-grub as necessary.
Using the update-grub command may require you to login as su - (the  - is important) and then do /usr/sbin/update-grub.

13

User Zone / Radeon HD7750 working on 64K PAGESIZE.

« on: April 08, 2022, 07:36:52 am »

When did Radeon start working on 64k pages?

14

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Wx9100 on Talos II

« on: April 01, 2022, 08:44:16 am »

@rheaplex

"The graphics card displays PetitBoot perfectly every time, and then almost always fails to come back up for the main OS."

If you switch OFF the main power and let the system go completely dead, does it boot differently (better) ?

15

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] AlmaLinux 8.5 now supports PowerPC

« on: March 23, 2022, 11:21:41 am »

I went through the install again today. Nope! Only Gnome is available, perhaps others will be available later.
It does work okay, but I'm not really a fan of Red Hat anymore even though it was the very first Linux I ever used back in the 90s (bought the boxed set on floppies).

If you look at my Avatar you'll know what was like getting it installed and working. 

I'll stay with Debian based distros, mostly due to being more familiar with it.