Topics

1

Applications and Porting / Discussion about Blender Cycles on PPC64

« on: February 25, 2026, 07:15:30 pm »

I was sitting down with a friend of mine who was a professional 3D modeler. By observing him working with Blender on my Blackbird workstation for a simple modeling job of a snow man, I realize the biggest blocker that push Blender to the finish line is the lacking of GPU acceleration rendering, specifically the Blender Cycles engine.

As you might have known that AMD ROCm is huge and complex so I rule out any possibility of AMD ever support PPC64. Other engines like CUDA is out of question because NVIDIA does not even offer driver for PPC64. The same goes with Intel unfortunately. The only option is OpenCL which is vendor-neutral but sadly its non-CUDA closeness design and buggy implementation forced Blender team to drop OpenCL few years ago.

What are options out there? LuxCoreRender is one potential solution because it supports OpenCL. In theory we could achieve it like this: LuxCoreRender → OpenCL API → RustiCL (Mesa) → radeonsi (Gallium) → amdgpu (kernel) → AMD GPU. I am unsure how reliable RustiCL is so this approach might be not working at all. However let's assume that it may work, there is still a huge effort to get LuxCore running on PPC64.

I am wondering if any community member has attempted to tackle this blocker issue before.

2

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] UT99, UTGOLD, UT2004 on native PPC64LE!

« on: February 23, 2026, 03:16:47 am »

Okay you click and get baited to read this post.

Well you might have heard that OldUnreal community has entered into an agreement with Epic Games to continue the support for these 3 UT games. That means they have gained access to the engine source codes.

I am trying my best to convince the team to add support for PPC64LE at https://github.com/OldUnreal/UT2004Patches/issues/316

I would really appreciate if more of us POWER-users could chime into the ticket to express our interests

3

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.18

« on: February 05, 2026, 05:56:16 am »

Well it is not news anymore however this kernel has been quite stable on Fedora.

Full changelog could be found at https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_6.18

4

Applications and Porting / [DEV] Proposal to drop PPC64 BE support in the next version of Golang

« on: January 19, 2026, 07:03:14 am »

See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/76244

It's unfortunate that Go might drop support for PPC64BE for real. That means many Golang-based softwares will cease running on POWER8 or even POWER5 G5 PowerMac.

5

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

6

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

7

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.

8

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

9

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?

10

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/

11

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

12

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.

13

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)

14

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

15

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.