Topics

1

Blackbird / Back in stock - the journey, chronicled

« on: April 19, 2023, 06:04:55 pm »

https://archive.is/1oW1i More Blackbirds are being produced
IRC, July 19:
tpearson: bkeys: We're targeting shipments starting September.  Not a guarantee, but you may use that for planning

The #Blackbirds are coming, the #Blackbirds are coming!  What are we up to now... wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Black…

Be sure to pre-order yours now at raptorcs.com/content/base/pr… to get one of these new units fresh off the line.  More updates to come in November!
https://twitter.censors.us/raptorcompsys/status/1454158996261253125

"Any word on when more Blackbird boards will be available?"
@RaptorCompSys Dec 9 Replying to @jwbowen
We had hoped to have them available last month but are working through some new issues in regard to supply chain.  We'll have an update later this month, hopefully with some good news!

April 26 https://twitter.censors.us/RaptorCompSys/status/1519090960256409600#m
In reference to the Blackbirds, we continue to work through the remaining COVID19 lockdown induced issues.  We are very close at this point to having them back in stock in significant quantities, so shipments should resume shortly.  Talos II remains in stock at this time.

Seems to be awaiting this FPGA https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semiconductor-corporation/ICE40HX1K-VQ100/3083577

3/2 thum> that would've been weird, Tim just mentioned those in an email to me...

@RaptorCompSys Mar 7
Best way to prevent this type of weapon being turned on you is to buy a Talos II right now, or a Blackbird soon

Mar 30
https://twitter.censors.us/RaptorCompSys/status/1508960651359793158#m
We'll have these back in stock soon:raptorcs.com/content/BK1SD1/…

https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php/topic,175.msg3017.html#msg3017
I placed mine in late September of last year. Cross your fingers.
edit: Got an email this evening confirming shipment, with a tracking number. What a weekend for me to go out of town... but next week I'm free to set it up!

By August 31st
https://www.talospace.com/2022/07/raptor-says-blackbird-crunch-ends-in.html
There are small improvements, but largely the same.  We don't want to have to increase prices to the extent that would be needed for a ground-up redesign.

In conjunction with the Arctic Tern release today, we also wanted to provide an update on Blackbird. We remain on track for shipment by August 31, 2022.

https://twitter.censors.us/RaptorCompSys/status/1569145916870868996#m
Those items would also be possible -- S2R is theoretically possible starting with the 1.02 hardware version of the Blackbird, due to power regulator control circuit changes...

https://twitter.censors.us/RaptorCompSys/status/1646221158151225344#m
April 12, 2023
The #Blackbird owner-controlled #POWER9 desktop mainboards and systems are now back in stock!

Okay, these are actually just my notes from tracking the situation. It took 34 months to reach full production again, which is laudable considering the circumstances they were up against. Individual orders were fulfilled and received even earlier than that.

2

Applications and Porting / OpenShot to be available in Bookworm

« on: April 17, 2023, 11:55:47 am »

As of Debian Bookworm, it seems that openshot-qt will now be installable due to previously non-ppc64el dependency python3-openshot gaining ppc64el status. I'd been resorting to pitivi, which is okay but not as robust or as reliable. I have updated my workarounds notes to include this improvement.

3

Operating Systems and Porting / Tim Pearson added as Debian maintainer

« on: March 25, 2023, 10:00:58 am »

Some news from Debian micronews: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Timothy Pearson

4

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Raptor CS fediverse presence?

« on: June 14, 2022, 03:43:35 pm »

I occasionally check the RCS twitter activity through some Nitter front end. But, as somebody who will never use centralized Twitter, I find myself wishing there was a way to participate. Is there any room at the table for a Mastodon network account?

5

User Zone / Calling for gaming experiences

« on: April 09, 2022, 04:52:48 pm »

If you have gotten any games up and running on your Power9 systems, please share anything about the experience here. I have been slowly compiling compatibility for various works and so far we have already evaluated: see wiki

Still need to check:

Evolution RTS
XEMU
Flare
Speed Dreams
OpenTomb
OpenMW
Colobot
Berusky
Pioneer
The Dark Mod
MegaGlest
UFO:AI
Terminal Overload
Yo Frankie!
Unvanquished
Red Eclipse 2
Rigs of Rods
Yorg
Oolite
Ryzom (Build resources for anyone interested. I have tried and failed several times so I might be in over my head on this one. But it would be really good to have as it is an active commercial title.)
PPSSPP

Really, anything from Libre Game Wiki or Open Source Game Clones. Although I have been biasing my tests toward games that have a general sense of visual polish and professionalism. I feel this information would be good to have for fence sitters deciding whether or not to go for an open power system.

Testing is slow going, since I don't yet have my second board and my only one is currently my production environment that I rely on for work and necessities.

6

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Story Time

« on: April 09, 2022, 04:25:43 pm »

Back sometime in 2015-2016 I became interested in Coreboot'd boards shortly after learning of Intel ME/AMD PSP from some heavy lifters in the free & open source community. The stuff for sale at the time were largely ASUS serverboards that had Coreboot ported. But they had been E-ATX or other eccentricities that made them difficult to build around. And the smaller boards were mostly either much older, poorly/partially supported or made concessions in allowing nonfree blobs to run.

That year I identified a board that followed standard ATX, supported big multicore CPUs and was more widely available: the SuperMicro H8SGL-F. Not a hard sell at the time only being 4-5 years old. I emailed Raptor Engineering, identified from the ASUS firmware ports, and inquired about porting the H8SGL-F. They quoted about 10,000 USD to handle such a job, which, at least at the time, I most certainly did not have the money for.

Not too long after, crowdfunding was opened for the Talos Power8 Secure Workstation. I followed the project through its development, crowdfunding failure, and eventual revival with Power9. And here I am today with an Open Power workstation humming away at the desk. Funny how things work.

Those old ASUS boards are still sold through some vendors but I'm glad they are no longer the only options for a strong, free workstation. I did end up buying some H8SGL boards anyway while awaiting Raptor's work, and I've got to say they weren't terrible. They, along with their Bulldozer/Piledriver chips, could be had for dirt cheap, supported ECC memory, IOMMU, did not contain embedded rootkit circuitry and the BMC could be disabled both in BIOS and via physical jumper. In doing so, reaching much of the way to decent design only without having free firmware.

7

Operating Systems and Porting / Improvements for AST2600

« on: March 03, 2022, 09:43:47 am »

The Aspeed display driver is supposedly getting some work. I wonder if this could translate into a more usable desktop experience on Blackbird?

8

Operating Systems and Porting / Investigating switch to Void or Fedora

« on: December 28, 2021, 07:07:14 pm »

Due to unfortunate circumstances, I may need to swallow my pride and retool my system for Void (or something else) instead of Debian.
I have built up 5+ years of specialized configuration around my Debian install so I'd really hate to have to deploy something else, but if it comes to that:

I am apprehensive about running Void, as their PPC port is unofficial. Is it vetted? Will it become unmaintained if some guy in Nebraska gets hit by a bus?

The sooner I can get this system back up, the sooner I can get back to building software and contributing to guides here and on the wiki.

9

Blackbird / Question for fellow Blackbird owners

« on: December 28, 2021, 06:40:23 pm »

Do you have any trouble booting Debian?

My C1P9S01 Rev 1.01 has the 2.0 firmware installed. It can boot Fedora and Void successfully.

But it cannot boot any Debian (either install media or an internal drive with Bullseye pre-installed). It just hangs forever at "SIGTERM received, booting...". This was not a problem before installing 2.0 firmware.

10

GPU Compute / Accelerators / AMD rendering issues with Debian Bullseye

« on: July 10, 2021, 06:38:14 pm »

I have been struggling with getting a graphical session (Gnome, or Sway) running under Debian Bullseye. The system is a Blackbird with RX560. After installing firmware-amd-graphics, disabling the AST and setting amdgpu in initramfs modules, the system gets display but crashes out of Gnome GUI.

I have tried setting a default GPU per select desired GPU at runtime. And disabled GLAMOR with the relevant portion of this since it was also erroring about GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY for glamor.

This allowed GDM to now start, however text fails to render and login fails, always returning to the GDM login prompt. Aside from the text, everything looks okay in the GUI so I am confident that the GPU is working at least. It looks like the screen needs to be selected, according to xorg logs:

[     3.162] (==) No Layout section.  Using the first Screen section.
[     3.162] (**) |-->Screen "Screen0" (0)
[     3.162] (**) |   |-->Monitor "<default monitor>"
[     3.163] (**) |   |-->Device "GPU1"
[     3.163] (**) |   |-->GPUDevice "GPU1"
[     3.163] (==) No monitor specified for screen "Screen0".
        All GPUs supported by the amdgpu kernel driver
[     3.175] (EE) No devices detected.
[     3.176] (EE)
Fatal server error:
[     3.176] (EE) no screens found(EE)
[     3.176] (EE)

Has anybody gotten Bullseye up and running with an AMD card? And how do you determine the correct screen to select?

11

User Zone / Forgotten Petiteboot menu password

« on: June 20, 2021, 08:26:09 pm »

I have idiotically reset the passphrase on my Blackbird (1.01 firmware) and can no longer make changes since I don't really know what I've set it to. Will resetting this require a serial cable? I see some resources saying it might be possible through ipmitool.

Update: I have found that I can still log in on BMC over ethernet. Just looking to figure out how to reset the petiteboot passphrase from here.

12

Applications and Porting / How to build Barony Game

« on: June 13, 2021, 03:05:15 pm »

I have finally gotten around to building Barony from source. No changes need to be made as it builds and runs just fine on Power. However, the instructions are a little incomplete, so I thought I would share here for the other 3 people on Earth who play this and also use PowerPC.

Adapted from their resources:

Code: [Select]

apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-net-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libpng-dev libz-dev libphysfs-dev rapidjson-dev

git clone https://github.com/TurningWheel/Barony.git

mkdir build && cd build
The OpenAL bit is important, otherwise it will have no sound.

Code: [Select]

cmake .. -DOPENAL_ENABLED=ON

cd ../

make -j 4
Should create barony: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, 64-bit PowerPC or cisco 7500, version 1 (GNU/Linux), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.10.0, BuildID[sha1]=3923290b782f5cac6359a315534a6b79471522ee, not stripped

Next, pull in the game resources:

Code: [Select]

wget https://github.com/TurningWheel/Barony/releases/download/V3.3.7-dev/tmp-master-assets.zip

unzip tmp-master-assets.zip
From your copy of Barony, the following asset directories will need to be copied into the same directory as the barony executable; books, images, items, maps, models, music, sound.

Code: [Select]

./barony to play

13

General OpenPOWER Discussion / One couldn't have chosen a better time to migrate away from x86

« on: November 18, 2020, 07:39:41 pm »

I just came across a piece describing how Microsoft, in partnership with AMD, Intel and Qualcom, intends to implement another "security" component on CPUs which goes a step further than management engines and TPMs. Essentially they want the chip to be able to pull in firmware updates through Windows update, further centralizing the MS power structure and placing users in a position where if they want to run a non-Windows OS the device must first be allowed by permission of its true master.

An architecture should never have to support various operating systems, the onus must fall on operating systems to support CPU architectures. I feel like I've stepped into the bizzaro universe.

14

Applications and Porting / Building software, a bit of a newb question

« on: September 12, 2020, 11:51:39 am »

When compiling programs on Power ISA, does make need to be directed explicitly to build for Power? Does the compiler default to its host architecture?

I am trying to build and run programs which are not available in the ppc64le Debian repos;

• OBS Studio: blew away my OS install after running a make install (GNOME began behaving unusually and eventually locked up, the system would not boot back up after hard resetting)
  
  Openspades: I was able to build successfully on an x86 host. I nearly do the same on my Blackbird but am afraid to run the make install with sudo priv due to my above experience with OBS)

Can anyone offer some insight?

15

Condor / Condor cancelled

« on: July 31, 2020, 05:48:28 pm »

This is a serious setback. I suppose the Talos II lite already occupies that space to a degree. Hopefully this is the extent of losses before things begin to turn around.

https://www.talospace.com/2020/07/condor-cancelled.html