Topics

1

Applications and Porting / [DEV] Upstreaming PPC64 optmisation patch for Google SKIA library

« on: May 01, 2026, 08:12:46 pm »

In the Chromium PPC64 patchset maintaned by Tim Pearson, there is a patch tor 2D graphic lib SKIA that would boost performance by converting SSE to VSX. It turns out Firefox is also using SKIA library too and I could see a MAJOR improvement in term of FPS in Firefox after adapting the patch. I do NOT believe that Firefox would ever accept a downstream patch for a third party library so my bet is on getting the patch submitted officially. From my own testing, the patched libs work well and have not produced any bug. So just curious why the patch has not been submitted to Google yet.

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 / [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.

4

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

5

Operating Systems and Porting / Chimera Linux planning to retire support for Big endian for 32bit and 64bit PPC

« on: March 26, 2026, 04:10:01 am »

ref: https://chimera-linux.org/news/2026/03/retiring-powerpc.html

Maintaining support for Little Endian is already hard enough. I can understand q66's decision. I personally has no particular softwares that would benefit greatly from BE.

6

Operating Systems and Porting / A bootloader in Rust

« on: March 18, 2026, 09:28:38 am »

I just randomly bump into this interesting project https://siliconislandblog.wordpress.com/2026/03/18/booting-with-rust-chapter-3/

We all have been using grub for boot loader so to see yet another project trying to address shortcomings of grub is definitely intriguing.

7

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 44 Beta is out!

« on: March 10, 2026, 06:20:14 am »

Ref: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-44-beta/

Have a go at it folks! Rough edges are expected

8

Applications and Porting / Discussion about Blender Cycles on PPC64

« on: February 25, 2026, 07:15:30 pm »

I was sitting down with a friend of mine who was a professional 3D modeler. By observing him working with Blender on my Blackbird workstation for a simple modeling job of a snow man, I realize the biggest blocker that push Blender to the finish line is the lacking of GPU acceleration rendering, specifically the Blender Cycles engine.

As you might have known that AMD ROCm is huge and complex so I rule out any possibility of AMD ever support PPC64. Other engines like CUDA is out of question because NVIDIA does not even offer driver for PPC64. The same goes with Intel unfortunately. The only option is OpenCL which is vendor-neutral but sadly its non-CUDA closeness design and buggy implementation forced Blender team to drop OpenCL few years ago.

What are options out there? LuxCoreRender is one potential solution because it supports OpenCL. In theory we could achieve it like this: LuxCoreRender → OpenCL API → RustiCL (Mesa) → radeonsi (Gallium) → amdgpu (kernel) → AMD GPU. I am unsure how reliable RustiCL is so this approach might be not working at all. However let's assume that it may work, there is still a huge effort to get LuxCore running on PPC64.

I am wondering if any community member has attempted to tackle this blocker issue before.

9

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

« on: February 23, 2026, 03:16:47 am »

Okay you click and get baited to read this post.

Well you might have heard that OldUnreal community has entered into an agreement with Epic Games to continue the support for these 3 UT games. That means they have gained access to the engine source codes.

I am trying my best to convince the team to add support for PPC64LE at https://github.com/OldUnreal/UT2004Patches/issues/316

I would really appreciate if more of us POWER-users could chime into the ticket to express our interests

EDIT: UT2004 is now available for ppc64le! https://github.com/OldUnreal/UT2004Patches/releases/tag/3374-preview-17, I've updated https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Games_Compatibility with the details. Gameplay video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hiaiBzoH7U

10

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.18

« on: February 05, 2026, 05:56:16 am »

Well it is not news anymore however this kernel has been quite stable on Fedora.

Full changelog could be found at https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_6.18

11

Applications and Porting / [DEV] Proposal to drop PPC64 BE support in the next version of Golang

« on: January 19, 2026, 07:03:14 am »

See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/76244

It's unfortunate that Go might drop support for PPC64BE for real. That means many Golang-based softwares will cease running on POWER8 or even POWER5 G5 PowerMac.

12

Applications and Porting / [DEV] Electron support for ppc64le

« on: November 04, 2025, 05:47:04 pm »

Electron is a well known web-based stack for cross-platform application development. It is not my cup of tea but many popular apps such as VS Code, Atom, Slack, etc are built with it. So having it support ppc64le upstream is definitely a big win for us all.

There is a ticket https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/15691 to gather efforts from the community to get the support implemented. lex-ibm has been maintaining his own build script which is known to work well up to v37. Because he is occupied with other priorities, it would be great if any member could give him a hand to:

* Get his build script to support latest v39
* Extract all patches and submit PRs upstream

13

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 43 is out

« on: October 28, 2025, 04:07:14 pm »

URL: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-43/

Rejoice! Yet another successful Fedora version. So what's new?

* RPM 6.0
* GNOME 49
* Disabled X11 for GNOME

AFAIK everything works as expected

14

Applications and Porting / [DEV] IBM offers ppc64le/s390x GitHub Actions CI/CD workers for OSS projects

« on: October 14, 2025, 05:59:03 pm »

Just in case if you are not aware, IBM https://github.com/IBM/actionspz now offer free GitHub Actions CI/CD boxes for OSS projects. IMHO this is huge because it help unblock the most asked question from developers who want to support POWER platform.

15

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Intel Discrete GPU demise is inevitable

« on: September 19, 2025, 02:11:15 am »

Intel announces the partnership with NVIDIA. The $5b 'bailout' deal seals the fate of Arc Discrete GPU ambition and Intel will ship CPU with NVIDIA GPU tech.

I was hoping that one day we might see 1st class driver for non-x86 Linux architecture... wishful thinking I know