Messages

1

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: FreeBSD 16 plans to drop support for PPC64.

« on: November 28, 2025, 04:31:43 pm »

Good news: I heard back from someone "who would know" who said they are probably going to keep ppc64le, at least. However, big-endian ppc64 is still being considered.

2

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: FreeBSD 16 plans to drop support for PPC64.

« on: November 18, 2025, 10:48:47 am »

Thanks. I know Warner and I asked him to clarify if this is BE-only or if this applies to ppc64le also.

3

Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Will it run DOOM?

« on: October 17, 2025, 06:16:58 pm »

Not sure I follow. What's the target hardware? Doom has of course run on Power Macs since nearly the beginning (I bought Doom II and Ultimate Doom for my 7300 at retail).

4

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

« on: October 15, 2025, 07:12:35 pm »

Very good news!

5

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Is there any tool to detect the logic that might be impacted by endianess?

« on: September 25, 2025, 07:53:39 pm »

Doom 3 as released circa 2004 is endian-neutral and has Altivec/VMX optimizations, yes. But Doom 3 BFG Edition - a later remastering of the game with an updated OpenGL implementation and engine - is a different animal outright. tle's probably right about there being problems.

I just remembered: I've got the official Xbox 360 version of Doom 3 BFG Edition here (I mean, it's ppc64 on Xenon), so it looks like BFG certainly can run big too. Just not sure what source code @tle is working from.

6

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Is there any tool to detect the logic that might be impacted by endianess?

« on: September 21, 2025, 08:04:24 pm »

I don't recall if Doom 3 did, but I know Quake 4 and Prey ran on the Power Mac G5 - I played both of them on my Quad - so the engine (at least at some point) was definitely endian-neutral.

7

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] applying patches to old version of gcc

« on: September 14, 2025, 12:51:16 pm »

This seems like the kind of thing that would have been fixed in a later gcc (the -std= flag should still work there, the backwards compatibility is generally good). I don't think the ICE here would be fixed with a compiler flag; the failure seems too specific.

8

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] applying patches to old version of gcc

« on: September 11, 2025, 03:38:39 pm »

I don't know off the top of my head what you'd do with genhooks, but does passing -std=c11 (or c++11, as appropriate) to the compiler help with the other issues?

9

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Is there any tool to detect the logic that might be impacted by endianess?

« on: September 07, 2025, 11:07:49 pm »

Generally anything that deals in a quantity and then starts addressing pieces of it (like a uint32_t that the code then starts accessing parts of with uint16_t or uint8_t, for example) will be sensitive to endianness, but there are other ways to make endian-dependent code, of course. But those are the most obvious sorts of "code smells."

10

Talos II / Re: Which type of flash chips for bmc/pnor and where to buy them?

« on: September 05, 2025, 10:13:50 am »

Excellent!

11

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Doom 3 BFG bad ass game XD

« on: August 19, 2025, 08:46:00 pm »

Excellent!

12

Talos II / Re: Which type of flash chips for bmc/pnor and where to buy them?

« on: July 24, 2025, 11:52:38 am »

I'm not sure which board you have, but on the T2 the BMC and boot flashes are near the BMC serial header next to CPU2 slots 2 and 3. My T2 has an MXIC MX25L25635FMI-10G in the BMC socket and a Micron RW187 in the boot socket which is their shorthand for a MT25QL512ABB8ESF-0SIT. The Blackbird should use similar flash chips, if not the same.

13

General CPU Discussion / Re: Power11 announced by IBM

« on: July 08, 2025, 11:14:48 am »

Guess we'll find out on the 25th.

14

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

« on: May 30, 2025, 09:12:12 pm »

Well, there's some good news. I finally bit the bullet and upgraded the Talos II, expecting I'd just have to deal with Wayland. To my surprise X11 started right up and I'm in Plasma 6.3 with just about everything intact.

But kwin-x11 crashes incessantly on the Blackbird, even with plasma-workspace-x11 installed. I'm pondering if some old residual package is making it work. I would be surprised if the fact the Talos has a GPU is the difference, especially since Wayland does work on the Blackbird with ASPEED graphics.

15

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

« on: May 26, 2025, 01:00:27 pm »

The recent GNOME X11 session updates don't fix the problem and I think there's a deeper issue (journalctl flags gnome-shell crashing in libsensors.so ?!). It's borrowed time anyway.

I was able to get Wayland off the ground from the command line on the Blackbird and the fans aren't being driven as hard. It does seem some performance improvements were made in this release, at least for KDE Plasma.