Messages

151

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: next generation Blackbird ideas

« on: May 09, 2020, 07:50:23 am »

It sounds like you want the Condor. IIRC its release is unfortunately on hold.

I actually like the simplicity of the Blackbird as it fits the minimalist design philosophy of having no more than is needed. That said, I was also surprised to find that there was no M.2 port. I've had a bit of a wish list of my own for any prospective Blackbird II:

• Integrated Displayport rather than (or along with) the HDMI port. I understand that HDMI is more popular in home theater but it is not freedom friendly compared to DP (there are licensing fees for implementing it at the very least).
• Stronger integrated graphics. The AST2500 is okay, the Talosspace author was even able to get a detailed 3D shooter running on it at something like 10 FPS which is impressive considering what it is. I would love to be able to game on a fully free graphics stack.
• Suspend-to-RAM funtionality.
• Shorter boot time.

152

General CPU Discussion / Re: CPU Performance DD2.2 vs DD2.3 (v2)

« on: May 07, 2020, 05:50:30 pm »

How do you mean? It's mostly upload the new BMC flash, note the MAC addresses, let it reset itself, reset the MAC addresses to their prior values, and then update the PNOR.

To be fair, it's been a long time since I checked the information. I just recall seeing a lot of WIP discussion at the time and decided to take the conservative approach.

153

General Hardware Discussion / Re: 2u Blackbird Build with 18 cores?!

« on: May 05, 2020, 07:14:26 am »

That's a familiar looking CPU fan solution 

If you ever do push it past 10% CPU usage, I would be interested to see if it doesn't shutdown on Blackbird's power contraints.

154

General CPU Discussion / Re: CPU Performance DD2.2 vs DD2.3 (v2)

« on: May 05, 2020, 07:06:17 am »

I'd strongly recommend you were on at least system package 2.00 for DD2.3, yes. It might be glitchy on earlier releases.

It has been largely running fine since installed, aside from that odd 2x cold boot. I am hesitant to upgrade the firmware as there is [still] no really clear procedure and I don't have the spare equipment to remediate if anything goes wrong.

155

General CPU Discussion / CPU Performance DD2.2 vs DD2.3 (v2)

« on: May 02, 2020, 04:32:31 pm »

I have been unable to find any documented information on the v2 chips beyond the listed features and some vague "5% in some cases" claim on IRC. So I went ahead and got a CP9M31 (v2) to compare. It was a drop in replacement for my Blackbird with the 1.01 firmware. After the system rebooted once with no POST chirp (and a minor heart attack) it proceeded to start up normally. Although the language on the Wiki seems to imply that the new 2.00 firmware is required to run v2 parts?: "PNOR Supports DD2.3 ("v2") CPUs".

Here are some really basic CPU benchmarks with hardinfo:

CPU part		CP9M01		CP9M31
Blowfish		No data		2.04		(Lower is better)
CryptoHash		854.30		945.86		(Higher is better)
Fibonacci		0.94		0.94		(Lower is better)
N-Queens		15.88		16.21		(Lower is better)
Zlib		1.59		1.54		(Higher is better)
FPU FFT		1.46		1.43		(Lower is better)
FPU Raytrace		2.07		2.04		(Lower is better)

I wouldn't call the test scientific as I did have Gnome system monitor and psensor open in the backgroud for the second run. Interestingly, the part with speculative execution mitigations actually fared worse in N-Queens and Zlib. But it does perform better overall, especially cryptohash. Sorry about the Blowfish stat, my first run didn't grab it and I had already rebuilt my system before I realized it. I will update the table if anybody who has a CP9M01 currently installed wants to run a quick hardinfo benchmark to contribute.

Is this worth adding to the wiki? What would be an appropriate page?

156

Applications and Porting / Re: Google Earth?

« on: April 16, 2020, 10:31:49 pm »

Not a solution but please check out the Marble project .

157

Applications and Porting / Re: Dolphin emulator works without JIT

« on: April 16, 2020, 10:29:48 pm »

I am not clued in on the subject but wouldn't there theoretically be less work to translate instructions for CG/Wii as they were also powerpc based?

158

General Discussion / Re: The pride of being Power!

« on: April 16, 2020, 10:22:59 pm »

I second that. It would be one thing if any x86 board maker went out, but the loss of Raptor would mean the effective end of something that is quite honestly a rare anomaly in the industry.

159

General Discussion / Re: The pride of being Power!

« on: March 22, 2020, 08:19:10 am »

I share your enthusiasm and hope that the momentum behind Power does not get killed by this pandemic.

160

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: powerxcell 8i

« on: February 29, 2020, 03:21:58 pm »

http://manualzilla.com/doc/6624107/gigaaccel-180?page=1

i found the japanese (what i think is japanese) manual for the gigaaccel it seems to have more info and better (more pixels, i like pictures) walk through on install
they also seem to have more information as a whole so i need a translator if possible about error leds codes

That is undoubtedly Japanese.

161

Blackbird / Re: Want more options for Blackbird™ Secure Desktop

« on: January 31, 2020, 06:53:27 am »

WARNING: Due to the heatsink design, an external air duct must be utilized if using this heatsink outside of a high airflow 2U server chassis, for example in a desktop system. This heatsink is not designed for passive cooling without an external fan and, if required by a non-2U chassis, an external air duct.

2U Heatsink

Also relevant: 2U fan shroud assembly

162

Blackbird / Re: Regular users issues

« on: January 30, 2020, 06:49:24 am »

_Do debian graphical installer work ootb? I’ve heard it has issues

The graphical installer is not available on the ppc64le build, in my experience. The good news is that the basic installer (uses whiptail to simulate a "GUI", I believe) is nearly identical to navigate, just use your Tab key instead of a mouse cursor.

163

Applications and Porting / Re: Software and Games for GPU new generation

« on: January 30, 2020, 06:44:59 am »

If you want to stress memory, CPU, storage and GPU pretty evenly, voxel games are never a bad choice. Try Minetest.
Flightgear, with all of it's physics modeling requirements, would also be a good test of between graphics rendering and CPU.

164

User Zone / Re: Rough edges and how I work around them (or not)

« on: January 08, 2020, 09:44:38 pm »

-snip-

For the longest time, I was under the impression that my distro enables trim by default. Checking systemctl reveals that it is not even running. Looks like I have a project to do!

I also tried out MPV and I like how minimalist it is but didn't explore it enough to find streaming or subtitling features. Maybe it is time for a revisit.

165

User Zone / Rough edges and how I work around them (or not)

« on: January 04, 2020, 05:23:03 pm »

This post is for documentation purposes and is not meant as a criticism of POWER or Raptor, rather, it is a place for me to think openly regarding my POWER9/Blackbird exerience so far. What is listed here may or may not necessarily be a POWER or Raptor board issue as I have yet to determine the root cause of several items. I welcome any suggestions or even fixes that you may have found in your own situations. The new platform has already forced me to learn quite a bit and hopefully this can be of use to somebody other than myself.


When rebooting sometimes restarts without onboard audio available
   complete reboot removing power from the board is required to rectify this situation

System stutter with any I/O activity on the main drive (could be the PCIe-NVMe adapter?)
   major I/O on the main drive (copying many large files to) makes the system nearly unusable[/s]
Retrospective: May have been combination of PCIe 3.0 storage and Gnome Shell/Nautilus thumbnailing large assets. No longer an issue.
Harddrive SMART reports an unsafe shutdown for every shutdown
 This has not technically been an issue yet, I am just gambling that it won't blow up in my face - does the platform need to issue some kind of shutdown signal to the drive?[/s]
2024: It did not blow up in my face. Since replacing with a PCIe 4.0 storage device, is no longer an issue.

Unavailable dependencies needed for packages that would otherwise be installable:
   mozc - that's okay anthy works just as well Just use anthy
   anki - one single python package is not built for ppc Ended up writing my own flashcard program. "Resolved".
   openshot - one single python package is not built for ppc. none of the other video editors will actually load any video content (missing codec? I'm too dumb to figure this out) openshot-qt

VLC playback   
VLC sometimes remains "running" after closing out - cannot even kill it from terminal (kill PID) it *only* closes through system monitor when this occurs
VLC unable to stream online video content, "cannot decode h264" (even though local h264 files run fine (another codec issue?)
Disregard. I've been using mpv instead since at least 2020.

Random lockups - unable to determine the cause yet, running clamav-daemon in on-access scanning mode does seem to trigger it when nautilus begins thumbnailing new media in a directory being opened for the first time - disabled for now
   also occured once when cycling through 漢字 within anthy[/s]
       has not occurred only twice since thread creation - marking as non-issue

Misc missing software;
   obs-studio (now available in Debian repos, as of Bullseye)
        openshot-qt (now available in Debian repos, as of Bookworm)
   openmw (now available in Debian repos, as of Bullseye)
        0ad
   dolphin-emu
   mupen64plus Gaming == unimportant, trivial issue

ffmpeg botches gif creation when using palattes - standard (ugly) gif creation with ffmpeg is fine however
   same exact config + script works okay on x86

ffmpeg (as of 5.1.4-0+deb12u1) botches h264 mp4 video encoding
Manually pass different codec with something like -vcodec mpeg2video or -vcodec vp9

Startup always selects another enP1s0... ethernet port for which there is no profile, must manually select the true port (might just be a GNOME bug?)
No longer an issue.

artha must be launched twice before it actually opens
 Trivial issue - very unlikely to be a fault of POWER/Blackbird Options > "Show Artha's window on launch"

Large images in GIMP are much slower to work with despite having a dedicated add in GPU (a weaker GPU on x86 was fine in comparison)
Just need to be more patient with the program/use smaller images[/s]
Performance has long since been adequate. I just retested and it only slows when moving large layers in 4K+ image sizes. Non-issue, "resolved".