Messages

1

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42

« on: April 17, 2025, 01:59:02 pm »

I'll defer to ClassicHasClass's preview before leaping in, but F41 was rather nice. Even managed to enable the HEVC decode and encode for my Radeon W6600 where it hadn't worked on F40.

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GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Intel Arc A770 - failed experiment

« on: March 20, 2025, 10:48:25 am »

It's been 2 years and ... unfortunately the driver still does not support non-x86.

i915's never getting rearchitected for non-x86, but aarch64 reportedly runs Arc with a few caveats using Intel's xe driver. There's nothing it offers that my W6600 doesn't do well enough for my needs at this point, but I'd like to think it'll work since Power9/Raptor's PCIe implementation's apparently less warty.

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GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Intel Arc Support in Kernel 6.8

« on: March 07, 2025, 09:24:24 pm »

it does support the current Alchemist line; the only thing we'll likely miss out on is support for the HuC microcontroller. Without that support the video encoder is rather less capable...

Kernel docs only mention reference HEVC/H.265. The media driver mentions that either HuC or shader based encoding(which is hopefully still better than CPU based). Does encoding for h.264, VP9, and AV1 work that way?

I found this upstream bug tracking the issue. From the link in the last comment it looks like no accelerated decode on the A380 even with i915 driver? that can't be right...

There was a lot of hubbub earlier about the HuC code only being maintained for i915, with its functionality being rolled into some other component for DG3 that would work across both i915 and xe. Part of me wants to get my hands on an Arc A770 I loaned to a friend and try it in my Blackbird this week, but I’d love to hear about somebody running it successfully before evicting the W6600 that’s quietly worked for me in the past year.

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Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 41 is out!

« on: March 03, 2025, 06:55:45 am »

Is it likely that I can jump from 40 to 42 without incident? I gave 41 a pass.

5

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: AMD OpenCL / ROCm

« on: February 18, 2025, 01:46:28 pm »

I tried ROCm years ago on this platform and it didn't work at all. Then I tried it on an x86 platform and it didn't work at all. Then I tried OpenCL and it was slow as hell.

My takeaway is that if you want to do reasonably portable GPGPU stuff learn WebGPU/Vulkan compute shaders. You can do also GPGPU stuff with opengles/webgl with "transform feedbacks" but its extremely limited and a total nightmare, speaking from experience.

OpenCL runs for contemporary Radeons in Fedora via RustiCL - managed to crack that nut a few months ago, but it took some doing. Clover is busted, as I think the firmware it expects to find hasn't been released for post-Navi hardware, and you have to blacklist it or it's likely to throw an error or hang your system outright.

6

General Discussion / Re: AMD RX 6900 XT from Sapphire NITRO

« on: February 18, 2025, 01:43:59 pm »

I am having a really hard time getting my 6600 to work on gentoo w/ linux 6.6

If anyone has any advice for getting it working, please give me a shout

I've had an RX 6600 (and, later, a W6600) running without much incident on Fedora since around kernel 6.2. Dumb screening questions first:
- have you installed all the latest device firmware to go with that kernel?
- have you gotten a different GPU working in this machine before?
- what's the kernel page size?

7

Blackbird / Re: BMC Fails to Boot

« on: January 14, 2025, 07:38:34 am »

Thanks to you both. I'll get one of those cables and try the i2cget BMC troubleshooting commands.

I suspect the PSU is the culprit as well. The one I have is 10 years old and may indeed be at the end of its life. However, I'd like to confirm before buying a replacement.

I would replace that decade-old PSU unless I had no other options. They get unpredictably flaky as their components degrade, and doing so will help a lot in your troubleshooting. Best wishes regardless.

8

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Radeon RDNA3 support?

« on: November 21, 2024, 02:45:16 pm »

General consensus I've seen is that the groundwork for RDNA3 support was laid alongside the RDNA2 fixes landing. I can say that the single slot Radeon Pro W6600 I snagged a while back has not given me a single burp or hitch since I installed it, and the single slot W5500 before that was also fine prior to a weird kernel regression around ~5.17, which I believe was sorted out a bit later.

9

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 41 is out!

« on: November 04, 2024, 09:01:20 am »

I look forward to the upgrade, pending any weird issues that crop up. I may defer to ClassicHasClass's probable writeup before taking the plunge.

10

General Hardware Discussion / Libre SOC, uh

« on: October 09, 2024, 10:19:14 am »

https://lists.libre-soc.org/pipermail/libre-soc-dev/

I wondered what happened with what appeared to be a promising project, and holy cow.

11

General CPU Discussion / Re: 3U HSF End of Life'd

« on: October 05, 2024, 09:07:43 pm »

The "talk is cheap" thing they've got going is kind of nice, until it's not any more. Maintaining a joyful anticipation for Talos III/Blackbird II/S1 systems with no news whatsoever for more than 11 months (with the announced release date ending in less than two months) is probably not something people are going to do.

Not even on their Txitter? I haven't been able to check ever since the API got closed off for frontends like nitter.

Knock on wood, but xcancel.com still works for me in a pinch. Their dead bird site account has not updated since May 16th of this year, when they retweeted something from OpenPower. Prior to that their last update was in February announcing the new BMC firmware, which I have foolishly still not gotten around to installing yet.

12

General CPU Discussion / Re: 3U HSF End of Life'd

« on: October 04, 2024, 08:46:11 am »

If anyone is desparate for heatsinks, I understand power8 heatsinks are physically compatible.  There are usually some on ebay in various heights.  Some part numbers may be 00RR234, 00RR232, 00E8918, 01KL499.  I think the 3u with fan was only used by Raptor, so there probably aren't many out there.  3D printing a fan shroud is probably not too hard.

Some news would be nice, but I'll admit I'm feeling a little pessimistic.

That is news people can use, and it should probably go onto the wiki. I'm with vikings.thum - I love my Blackbird, but the lack of news while prices on existing products rise and components as foundational as 3U heatsinks are delisted feels a smidge like watching the water rise during a bad storm.

13

General CPU Discussion / 3U HSF End of Life'd

« on: October 02, 2024, 10:40:13 am »

Raptor's page has de-listed the 3U heatsink due to it being discontinued. Has the situation with the modified bracket to accommodate x86 heatsinks gotten to a point where they could offer those in their place? Feels like Raptor's in an increasingly awkward place.

14

Third Party CPU Discussion / Re: Why haven't we seen boards with Power9 / MicroWatt?

« on: August 31, 2024, 06:47:53 pm »

HiFive Unmatched $740

If you want to play with the Unmatched you'll want to order from Mouser - they have the same board on sale for $299. Caveats apply: this is being clearanced out because SiFive's Premier P550 has been announced and will likely ship before the end of the year. And they are not fast - performance is north of a Pi 3B+ but well south of a Pi 4, and there is no SIMD whatsoever. Just about any GPU made in the last decade will be bottlenecked in one way or another, though I believe patches are landing about now to facilitate RISC-V operation with current Radeons. I can't emphasize the sluggishness enough - maybe it was on IRC where a dev talked about how his Power9 could emulate a RISC-V machine that was at least as fast as the Unmatched, and possibly with more threads.

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Third Party CPU Discussion / Re: Why haven't we seen boards with Power9 / MicroWatt?

« on: August 29, 2024, 02:22:57 pm »

If RCS sought to develop and sell RISC-V systems, I would have no reservations about buying any. It's not that I have any particular loyalty to PowerPC or anything. It just happened to be the most mature, complete and performant solution available.

Honestly? I'd love to, if the resulting device were decent quality, priced more in line with the performance expectations of RISC-V, and open source.

C'mon, Raptor. Sell us a RISC-V Shrike.