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16

Applications and Porting / [DEV] LuaJIT PPC64 support

« on: August 14, 2023, 08:55:52 am »

PPC64 support is still a big mess. The sponsorship for PPC64 support was proposed in https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/issues/42 however there has been little responses from the core team of LuaJIT which has lead to frustration to whom who might have given it a go.

Notably, the attempt by Gustavo Scalet (https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/pull/54) in 2016 was not good enough. According to Mike Pall, the code was no good (ref: https://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/PPC64le-port-status,1)

Other ports that have better quality but has since get so out of sync, for example https://github.com/mwkmwkmwk/LuaJIT/tree/ppc64-ffi. Again there is zero attempt to get this merged to upstream LuaJIT.

I reckon the best approach is to crowd fund a bounty for Mike Pall to actually work on a proper port.

17

GPU Compute / Accelerators / AMD Pro W7xxx series is out folks!

« on: August 04, 2023, 07:29:22 pm »

The RDNA3-based Pro mid range GPU from AMD has been announced.

Both W7500 and W7600 can do AV1 encode/decode and are certified to run pro apps.

I am eyeing the W7500 as it does not require additional power draw. Plus it is a single slot
profile so it might just fit it my tight computer case.

The only thing I am unsure is how well amdgpu in Linux 6.4 or 6.5 supports Navi 33

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/19993/amd-announces-radeon-pro-w7600-w7500

18

Applications and Porting / [MISC] CDE 2.5.1 on Fedora 39

« on: July 27, 2023, 07:13:49 am »

I am happy to report that CDE 2.5.1 can be compiled on Fedora 39 (rawhide as of now) successfully.

Here is how:

Code: [Select]

# get the cde-2.5.1.tar.gz from SourceForge
tar xzvf cde-2.5.1.tar.gz

sudo dnf group install c-development development-tools
sudo dnf install pam-devel libutempter-devel libXp-devel libXt-devel libXmu-devel libXft-devel libXinerama-devel libXpm-devel \
motif motif-devel libXaw-devel libX11-devel libXScrnSaver libtirpc-devel xset sessreg xrdb \
libjpeg-turbo-devel freetype-devel openssl-devel tcl-devel ksh m4 ncompress patch \
rpcbind bison xorg-x11-xbitmaps xorg-x11-proto-devel flex opensp libXrender-devel \
xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi rpcgen bdftopcf libXdmcp-devel
cd cde-2.5.1
./configure
make -j32
sudo make install
sudo service rpcbind start
sudo cp contrib/desktopentry/cde.desktop /usr/share/xsessions/
# verify with
rpcinfo -p
# log out from GNOME shell and back to GDM, choose CDE to start the session

19

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.4

« on: July 14, 2023, 06:42:18 am »

URL: https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/26/linux_kernel_6_4_released/

I have not tried it out yet. I hope it does not break the amdgpu.

AFAIK there ain't much changes related to PowerISA

20

Operating Systems and Porting / A comprehensive list of build scripts for Linux softwares

« on: July 14, 2023, 06:37:24 am »

Thanks to MPC7500 for sharing this awesome link to a huge list of scripts to build popular Linux ppc64le softwares

URL: https://github.com/ppc64le/build-scripts

This no doubt comes handy for admins/users

21

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Rocky Linux 9.2 held back release for ppc64le

« on: May 16, 2023, 10:40:11 pm »

Source: https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-9-2-ga-release/

Sue to breaking changes with Python 3.9 (Bug report URL https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2203919)

Not a good news but better late than never

UPDATE: the issue has been resolved https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-9-2-power-le-update/

22

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 38 is finally out!

« on: April 23, 2023, 09:52:39 am »

More info can be found at https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-38-workstation/

TL;DR; the GNOME animation has became sluggish... yet again!

23

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 38 Beta - time to test for regression

« on: March 16, 2023, 08:45:11 pm »

Source: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-38-beta/

The final version would be out in late April 2023. Now is the time to get it installed and tested.

24

Applications and Porting / [Games] Tetris Grand Master 2 Plus (native port)

« on: February 12, 2023, 07:02:12 am »

The folks at The Absolute Reference (aka taref) has managed to reverse engineer the famous arcade Tetris game.

The port is based on top of SDL2. The assets (as of now) are still from the `tgm2p.zip` MAME rom. The author said he would
port the engine to support OpenGL and then will add hires assets for true 4K gaming experience.

25

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.2 brings new qspinlock to bolster large system scalability

« on: December 19, 2022, 10:10:42 pm »

Quote

Up to now IBM Power processors on Linux have relied on the generic queued spinlock "qspinlock" implementation within the kernel but that has been found to cause latency and starvation issues on large IBM POWER10 servers

Souce: https://www.phoronix.com/news/IBM-Power-Linux-6.2

I don't have enough knowledge to tell if it would benefit the POWER9

26

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.1 is officially released

« on: December 11, 2022, 08:27:34 pm »

Source: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wj_HcgFZNyZHTLJ7qC2613zphKDtLh6ndciwopZRfH0aQ@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

I have not gone through all the changes to pick out those that are related to powerpc. But one thing I know is that this release has supported the RDNA2-based GPU like the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT

27

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Rocky Linux 9.1 is out!

« on: November 27, 2022, 04:10:18 pm »

Source: https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-9-1-ga-release/

Notable Changes

* Keylime, a remote boot attestation and runtime integrity management solution using Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) is now available.
* New module stream versions include node.js 18, php:8.1, maven:3.8, and ruby:3.1.
* New compiler toolset versions include GCC 12, LLVM 14.0.6, Rust 1.62, and Go 1.18.

Cloud Images

* Container images are now available for all x86-64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x.
* Vagrant images are now available for x86-64 and aarch64
* Official Rocky Linux images are now available on Oracle Cloud Platform.
* LVM variants of the generic, EC2, and Azure images are now available.

28

Applications and Porting / [NEWS] dotNet SDK officially supported PPC64LE

« on: November 26, 2022, 07:09:51 pm »

Source: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/powerdeveloper/blogs/janani-janakiraman/2022/11/07/net7-support-linux-on-power

I guess this can be a good news for enterprise customers who seek to leverage OpenPOWER
platform. You might not a big fan of dotNet but it is no doubt a major player in the industry.

29

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] RHEL 9.1 is out!

« on: November 20, 2022, 09:09:16 pm »

Press release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221116005632/en/Red-Hat-Introduces-Latest-Versions-of-Red-Hat-Enterprise-Linux

30

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Alma Linux 9.1 is out!

« on: November 17, 2022, 04:55:38 am »

Consider the successor of CentOS, Alma Linux today announced the version 9.1 just shortly after the release of RHEL 9.1

Download URL: https://almalinux.org/blog/almalinux-91-now-available/