Messages

31

Operating Systems and Porting / Tim Pearson added as Debian maintainer

« on: March 25, 2023, 10:00:58 am »

Some news from Debian micronews: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Timothy Pearson

32

Blackbird / Re: Blackbird Cooling

« on: November 01, 2022, 08:27:06 pm »

Please checkout the cooling idea at DIY 2U heatsink+fan setup. I have my Blackbird stuffed into a slimline mATX case and the low-profile CPU cooler. The temps never really exceed 50C even when gaming.

33

User Zone / Re: Void Linux thread

« on: July 31, 2022, 11:00:41 am »

You have to set the correct time / date.

I’ve been trying, but whether I use date within the skiroot shell to set the date or within Void itself, it doesn’t seem to stick. Forgive me, I’m new to this - can you show me how?

edit: to clarify, date appears to update correctly, but hwclock remains firmly convinced that it is June 8th, and nothing I’ve been able to do disabuses it of the notion. I’ve tried syncing the system time to the hardware clock so they’re at least both wrong to the same extent, but networking still doesn’t work

edit the second: I skipped connecting to the BMC initially, which is where I’m supposed to initially set the date. D’oh. I’ll take care of that this week and pray until then.

The options through BMC can be either NTP or manually set. I'm interested to see what works for you, since I've found both to be a bit fussy.

34

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Arctic Tern user manual posted

« on: July 31, 2022, 10:55:26 am »

No. A PCIe slot is not mandatory
https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1548097582630445058

Okay, so one needs to consider cable length skew. For some reason I thought that the FlexVer port was going to be used for this add-in. Maybe it was just wishful thinking since my Blackbird PCIe are all occupied.

35

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Forum signature size.

« on: July 16, 2022, 11:23:52 pm »

Sorry for double-post but you can also do what user MPC7500 does and just link to a dedicated wiki page for your build.

Anyway, we could use more builds in the user system gallery and descriptions of user systems.

@MPC7500

Do you mind if I add your NZXT case shots to the Gallery?

36

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Forum signature size.

« on: July 16, 2022, 11:15:04 pm »

Can you change the size of the signature from 300 to 1024 characters? Manipulating the colors of characters quickly exhausts this limit ;-)

I haven't tried but are we able to link images? You might be able to put it all in a png for now.

Update: It seems text-only.

37

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: July 16, 2022, 11:12:09 pm »

Thank you all for your patience during these extremely challenging times, and we hope that the platform is worth the wait!

Level heads and long term perspectives prevail in tumultuous times. I hope you at Raptor know just how important the work that you're doing is.

Second, we'd definitely like to hear back from you all when you do receive your units -- public tweets, reviews, etc. are much appreciated, and will help drive further adoption of the platform and of owner controller computing in general.

I will be able run and review more elaborate testing once I have a duplicate staging system available to try the crazier things on. My one and only Blackbird being a critical primary system has been a source of caution.

38

Blackbird / Re: Did my Blackbird just die on me?

« on: July 14, 2022, 07:19:56 pm »

"Pin 26" is only referenced on the PCIe port and on J10117, which I think is the FlexVer port? I'm not sure how exacting that error message might be.

In September I had a similar error message.
It happened after a thunderstorm and lightning struck (far away). There was a surge as a result.
During the same time, our heating control system also needed to be replaced, because of this.

Long story short: I had to reflash the BMC and OpenPOWER firmware.
https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Updating_Firmware

Now I always turn off the power strip when a storm is coming. BTW, Awilfox had the same issue, longe time ago.

It might also be worth putting behind a surge suppressor. Normally I wouldn't care so much but seeing as these parts cost what they do...

39

User Zone / Re: Calling for gaming experiences

« on: July 14, 2022, 07:07:55 pm »

Have we a wiki page for all games that are compatible with POWER9?

And it's growing. Vega Strike just merged a PR that fixes builds on ppc64(le) so I have to get around to fixing those notes.

40

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Rocky Linux 9.0 is out folks!

« on: July 14, 2022, 06:59:53 pm »

Finally. Now we have CentOS Stream, AlmaLinux, Circle Linux and Rocky Linux

It looks like you might be able to add Trisquel to that list soon.

41

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Raptor CS fediverse presence?

« on: July 14, 2022, 06:58:58 pm »

I'm in agreement. Either that or a Pleroma instance. Seriously, if there's any way I can help I will try.

42

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: July 14, 2022, 06:53:49 pm »

I placed mine in late September of last year. Cross your fingers.

edit: Got an email this evening confirming shipment, with a tracking number. What a weekend for me to go out of town... but next week I'm free to set it up!

That's great to hear! I hope all goes well. It sounds like the Free Software Foundation might be eyeing some Blackbirds too.

43

Blackbird / Re: Stereo audio channels swapped?

« on: July 12, 2022, 11:22:38 pm »

I've had to swap my headphones L/R around physically a couple of times before I finally figured out that the CM106 sound device had the channels mixed up. You're not the only one.

44

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Raptor CS fediverse presence?

« on: June 14, 2022, 03:43:35 pm »

I occasionally check the RCS twitter activity through some Nitter front end. But, as somebody who will never use centralized Twitter, I find myself wishing there was a way to participate. Is there any room at the table for a Mastodon network account?

45

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: June 14, 2022, 03:35:31 pm »

For example, do you see the IBM POWER9 chips continuing to be available in sufficient quantities for the Raptor ecosystem?

Yes, there are many, many years worth of the CPUs available.

And even if there weren't, aftermarket availability would persist. One can still find piledriver and bulldozer Opterons for socket G34 all these years later being sold out of recycling operations and private sellers. I know I've got IBM Sforza socket CPUs laying around unused right now, that could find their way to ebay in such an event. I think it's the fact that there is a specialized microcosm for both of the previous examples.

This wasn't directed so much to you as it was to the general developer community.  We've seen some knee-jerk reactions when bad news comes out, including some people that basically just gave up and said "I'm doing x86 only, ME and vendor blobs are inevitable".

I've seen that defeatist mentality in all manner of other freed technology where it's always rationalized away as "you'll never be able to 100% avoid malicious functionality so you might as well use ____. It's what everyone else is using anyway". I believe this qualifies as nirvana fallacy. Then again, I can't call myself a developer. So I have no plans to stop using my RCS board(s) unless something better comes along.

I fear that the effort to merge the Firefox powerpc64le JIT support will hit similar nontechnical roadblocks.

I don't think so, insofar as I have unofficial OKs once I get it to a point I'm happy with it. I'm just not happy with it yet.

I'm looking forward to the work getting mainlined