Topics

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

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.

3

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

4

User Zone / Radeon HD7750 working on 64K PAGESIZE.

« on: April 08, 2022, 07:36:52 am »

When did Radeon start working on 64k pages?

5

Operating Systems and Porting / Devuan

« on: January 15, 2022, 12:40:35 pm »

Devuan

    Today I installed Devuan. It works.

https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/dists/chimaera/main/installer-ppc64el/current/images/netboot/

I have not done anything with it yet except try a few programs. Looks good for a new (and different) distro. It does boot very fast.

I used the mini.iso and the expert install option selecting the 5.10.0-9 kernel.
I'm also had to use the Realtec RTL8168e-2.fw nic firmware. Which I rescued from a x86 box.
I'm also using the AST graphics.
So far......So good. 

6

General Discussion / 2 boot work-around

« on: December 29, 2019, 02:21:25 pm »

I have a minimal Debian install that I use for kernel building. It does not have X.
After tinkering around for a bit I noticed I had warm rebooted more than 3 times. So just for grins I did four more warm reboots. No problems.

I then started Debian 10.2 (with X) and killed the display manager and was able to warm reboot that 4 times, that is all I tried. The same for Ubuntu 18.04

While in X open a terminal, log in as root or use sudo,

root@deb /etc/init.d/lightdm stop ---or whatever display manager is on your system like xdm, gdm3, etc..

Then CTRL+ALT+F2, login as root(or sudo) and type reboot.

It seems to take a bit of time for X to shutdown in Ubuntu.

Please let us know if this works for you more than 3 reboots.