Messages

1

Applications and Porting / [DEV] Electron support for ppc64le

« on: November 04, 2025, 05:47:04 pm »

Electron is a well known web-based stack for cross-platform application development. It is not my cup of tea but many popular apps such as VS Code, Atom, Slack, etc are built with it. So having it support ppc64le upstream is definitely a big win for us all.

There is a ticket https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/15691 to gather efforts from the community to get the support implemented. lex-ibm has been maintaining his own build script which is known to work well up to v37. Because he is occupied with other priorities, it would be great if any member could give him a hand to:

* Get his build script to support latest v39
* Extract all patches and submit PRs upstream

2

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 43 is out

« on: November 02, 2025, 06:50:06 am »

@migsutu would you be able to send me the full `dmesg` logs?

3

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 43 is out

« on: October 30, 2025, 09:31:18 pm »

Fedora has just bumped GNOME to 49.1

Everything still works nicely. I am working with upstream packagers to re-introduce ppc64le packages for 0ad game and let's hope I could get ziglang ppc64le rpm package in Fedora 44.

4

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 43 is out

« on: October 30, 2025, 09:29:41 pm »

I attempted installation of Workstation and KDE Plasma Edition with the release version. I am getting error "drm:radeon device init [radeon]*ERROR* Unable to find PCI I/O Bar"

No GUI ever comes up on the main graphics at this point. I went back to my old Fedora 42 Live thumbdrive and it correctly boots and loads up. The Beta of 43 seemed to work fine, but something appears wrong with Radeon drivers on the PPC64LE release with the release version. Unfortunately I don't have an Nvidia card to try.

Could you please confirm if you could re-produce the same issue with GNOME version?

That could be related to the kernel and amdgpu version of that installer image.

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Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 43 is out

« on: October 28, 2025, 04:07:14 pm »

URL: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-43/

Rejoice! Yet another successful Fedora version. So what's new?

* RPM 6.0
* GNOME 49
* Disabled X11 for GNOME

AFAIK everything works as expected

6

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

« on: October 14, 2025, 05:59:03 pm »

Just in case if you are not aware, IBM https://github.com/IBM/actionspz now offer free GitHub Actions CI/CD boxes for OSS projects. IMHO this is huge because it help unblock the most asked question from developers who want to support POWER platform.

7

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Intel Discrete GPU demise is inevitable

« on: October 10, 2025, 07:15:58 am »

> I wonder how this would affect someone that, say, wanted to license Imagination IP and fab a DXTP-based GPU at an Intel plant. Would Nvidia want Intel to say no? Would that be grounds for an anticompetitive lawsuit, or would Nvidia be in the clear if they're partially owners?

I think the US government will pressure any company who dare to sue Intel and NVIDIA. We all know that Trump administration is very pro-Israeli so they won't let Intel go down. After all Trump was betting on Intel to bring back the chip fabrication capability, it is too risky to put all eggs in the Taiwanese bucket.

8

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 43 Beta - please help the community test this release

« on: October 02, 2025, 07:39:01 am »

In the early 1990s, I didn't know what to choose, Linux or FreeBSD. I chose Linux for the reasons you mention. Now the situation is not so clear-cut. Yes, more companies support Linux, but I don't use those companies' products. Everything I use is 100% available in FreeBSD. I've been using FreeBSD on MoreFine M600 for a year now, and I'm happy with this solution.

I was taught UNIX with FreeBSD back in school days. Then I actually liked FreeBSD because of its consistency in user space toolings and packaging. I find Linux distribution (as the name suggests) is always a constant battle of mix and match of kernel and softwares in which vendor choose to incorporate their own ideas how an Linux OS should be. That alone has caused so much fragmentation just like the UNIX war in the old days, even though most Linux bistros have adopted standards it does not really help when one want to switch from one distro to other distro.

9

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 43 Beta - please help the community test this release

« on: September 24, 2025, 07:16:44 am »

I hold no strong opinion about X11 simply because my usecase does not really care if it is X11 or Wayland. Having said that I think I could understand why they decided so, sometimes it takes lots of guts to ditch the legacy baggage to start fresh. It might lead to the same path all over again.

10

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

« on: September 19, 2025, 04:32:39 am »

Most of the time I would not get any error but likely run into unexpected behaviour when running the game or apps.

Your verbs are unclear - "would not" and "likely run into" are future tense, as in, you are projecting what might occur.  Are you saying the entire code base compiled but has odd behavior when running in Big-endian mode?

If you can compile the source code, run it in Little-endian mode and see if the same unexpected behaviors are present.

Yes, I do project there are potential issue if the app is complex. Sometimes the app just crash early on, but sometimes it does not. The latter scenario can be real pain if applications are lacking of tests. I agree with you that one could always do comparison with ppc64le version. My question is simply curiosity if there is any tool that could analyze the codes / assembly / bytecodes to pick up places that might susceptible to endianness issue

11

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 43 Beta - please help the community test this release

« on: September 19, 2025, 04:18:43 am »

XFCE runs flawlessly as expected.

It's unfortunate that many X11-based WM are not picked up by GDM (Wayland only now) so I have to use SDDM instead.

12

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Intel Discrete GPU demise is inevitable

« on: September 19, 2025, 02:11:15 am »

Intel announces the partnership with NVIDIA. The $5b 'bailout' deal seals the fate of Arc Discrete GPU ambition and Intel will ship CPU with NVIDIA GPU tech.

I was hoping that one day we might see 1st class driver for non-x86 Linux architecture... wishful thinking I know

13

Firmware / Re: Cross-build compiler environment for SBE

« on: September 18, 2025, 06:35:30 pm »

I have not tried to but wondering have you checked https://github.com/open-power/ppe42-gcc ?

14

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 43 Beta - please help the community test this release

« on: September 18, 2025, 06:30:35 pm »

Looking good so far.

Xonotic no longer crash, in fact I think the crash was related to Fade Coronas GPU option

0ad was unfortunately disabled for ppc64le, I am trying to get the maintainer to backport some patches to get it build again https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2396311

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

« on: September 17, 2025, 11:12:01 am »

Vector registers are endian.  The most common use of vector code is through intrinsics, which should handle endian issues.

What is your development environment?  What error messages do you get when you simply try to compile the code?

Most of the time I would not get any error but likely run into unexpected behaviour when running the game or apps.