Topics

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 / [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

3

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.

4

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

5

Applications and Porting / Has anyone attempted to use systemd-boot?

« on: September 17, 2025, 11:09:22 am »

GRUB2 has always been default on major distributions that support PPC64LE.

Just curious if anyone has ever attempted to use systemd-boot instead?

6

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

« on: September 16, 2025, 06:17:43 pm »

Yet another cycle with Fedora. The Fedora 43 Beta is out but AFAIK it is a bit edgy, that is some applications and games have regressions (for example Xonotic). However there are apps that have been fixed for example GNOME Loupe. Please have a go at it and report all bugs you could find.

The Fedora 43 runs on the new GNOME 49.rc (which is quite polished compared to the GNOME 48) and we all know the Wayland is going to be the de facto in Fedora 44 or GNOME 50. Other changes are:

* Newer version of GCC, LLVM
* Kernel 6.17.0.rc
* DNF5! - please test it thoroughly
* and more rust-toolings... just kidding, Fedora has not joined Ubuntu on the 'rustic' bandwagon yet, in fact the uutils/coreutils is so out-of-date in Fedora and I do not think Fedora will ever replace GNU coreutils with the rust version.

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

7

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

« on: August 21, 2025, 08:26:40 pm »

In light of the emergence of AI-assistant toolings, I am wondering if anyone has recommendation of any model/tooling that could help developers identify quickly logics in the codebase that might be impacted with endianess? I am looking into the source code of DOOM 3 BFG and slowly going through to see if it could be ported to PPC64 Big Endian but darn it is so much time-consuming, there must be a better way I assume

8

Applications and Porting / flac 1.5.0 now supports multithreaded encoding

« on: August 11, 2025, 12:03:45 am »

Code: [Select]

tle@fedora ~/W/wavs (main)> rm *.flac && time flac -V -8 -j 32  collectathon.wav

flac 1.5.0
Copyright (C) 2000-2009  Josh Coalson, 2011-2025  Xiph.Org Foundation
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.  Type `flac' for details.

collectathon.wav: Verify OK, wrote 8261224 bytes, ratio=0.551

________________________________________________________
Executed in  186.32 millis    fish           external
   usr time    1.43 secs    359.00 micros    1.42 secs
   sys time    0.02 secs      0.00 micros    0.02 secs

tle@fedora ~/W/wavs (main)> rm *.flac && time flac -V -8 -j 1  collectathon.wav

flac 1.5.0
Copyright (C) 2000-2009  Josh Coalson, 2011-2025  Xiph.Org Foundation
flac comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.  Type `flac' for details.

collectathon.wav: Verify OK, wrote 8261224 bytes, ratio=0.551

________________________________________________________
Executed in  963.39 millis    fish           external
   usr time  962.46 millis  419.00 micros  962.04 millis
   sys time    0.00 millis    0.00 micros    0.00 millis

So with 32 threads, it's 5x faster than 1 thread.

9

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Debian 13 Trixie is out!

« on: August 10, 2025, 07:46:58 pm »

The distro runs kernel 6.12 LTS and GNOME 48, GCC 14.2, OpenJDK 12, Python 3.13 and various updates (https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/whats-new.en.html#what-s-new-in-the-distribution)

Please be mindful about the problems with VMs on ppc64el (https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.en.html#problems-with-vms-on-64-bit-little-endian-powerpc-ppc64el)

10

Applications and Porting / [DEV] Adding support for POWER SIMD in ispc lib

« on: July 30, 2025, 06:39:07 pm »

I've just lodged a ticket at https://github.com/ispc/ispc/issues/3517 and wondering if anyone in the community has done a similar Implicit SPMD Program Compiler for PPC64 yet. Many thanks

11

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.16

« on: July 27, 2025, 08:41:48 pm »

It's finally out! A massive release IMHO. Lots of improvements for NVIDIA GPU driver. Unfortunately not much changes on the POWER side.

Ref: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Released

My AMD Radeon RX6600 continues to work with this new version.

12

Applications and Porting / [HELP] Does Loupe application work for you?

« on: July 16, 2025, 04:32:18 am »

Well I am trying to chase down a big with glycin-rs library that cause Loupe fail to open any image file. This bug has been around for few years on Fedora. I'm wondering if you could let me know if this app actually work at all if you are using Ubuntu or Debian. Great thanks in advance

EDIT: the issue has been addressed upstream

13

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 42

« on: April 15, 2025, 08:26:28 am »

Fedora 42 ships the nearly-final GCC 15 compiler along with Golang 1.24, the LLVM 20 toolchain, PHP 8.4, Ruby 3.4, and a ton of other software upgrades. If GNOME isn't your thing, KDE Plasma 6.3 is available along with the Xfce 4.20, LXQt 2.1 and Cosmic Alpha 6 desktops. The new kernel 6.14.2 play nicely with ppc64le. I have not encountered any major issue.

GNOME 48 is actually quite good now. The only thing does not work for me is the new Loupe Image Viewer which is unable to view any image.

14

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] Raptor Call of the Shadows

« on: April 03, 2025, 07:20:34 pm »

One of the best DOS games in the 90s. The port itself is open sourced by the original author.

Video: https://youtu.be/5ONEkjAw-1o

15

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.14

« on: March 26, 2025, 08:12:51 am »

It is out! More details could be found at https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14

There are no mentioning of any PowerPC-related changes unfortunately.