Topics

46

Applications and Porting / [DEV] An attempt to package chromium for ppc64le in the official Fedora DNF repo

« on: September 10, 2023, 09:07:01 am »

UPDATE 31 July 2024: Fedora has adopted the patchset that Debian and other distros are using (https://gitlab.solidsilicon.io/public-development/open-source/chromium/openpower-patches). Great thanks to Than Ngo of RedHat, Timothy Pearson (Debian package maintainer)

EDIT: Than Ngo of Red Hat has cherry-picked all ppc64le patches into the main trunk. Now we officially have chromium for Fedora 40 or newer!

URL https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/chromium/pull-request/37 *STILL WORK IN PROGRESS*

The last time I was successful at getting Chromium up and running in Fedora is 3 years ago. That was version 88. Now Chromium has reached version 117.

This weekend I've spent a bit of time to adapt Timothy Pearson's patchset from Debian deb package for the official chromium Fedora RPM. So far I could get the whole application compiled and running HOWEVER the browser get into SIGSEGV or SIGTRAP with web pages that has JavaScript. So I speculate this might be related to the V8 engine.

The error outputs in the console is not so much helpful:

Code: [Select]

[1961086:1961086:0910/235841.808221:ERROR:CONSOLE(1)] "Uncaught SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: /([^\s]+?)\(([\s\S]*)\)/: Maximum call stack size exceeded", source: chrome://resources/polymer/v3_0/polymer/polymer_bundled.min.js (1)
[0910/235911.891648:ERROR:check.cc(298)] Check failed: false. NOTREACHED log messages are omitted in official builds. Sorry!
[0911/000357.201831:ERROR:check.cc(298)] Check failed: false. NOTREACHED log messages are omitted in official builds. Sorry!

I also attempt to gdb and could not find any useful backtrace (NOTE: I manually commented out all `strip` symbols in the build spec file).

The full log out when trying to open a webpage https://gist.github.com/runlevel5/3c85515c521ebcfb6ca65e4697b6b1d1

Any idea how to get more logs out of V8 in Chromium?

47

General Hardware Discussion / A promo video from IBM boasting its new Power10-based E1080 server

« on: September 08, 2023, 06:08:44 am »

Everything, I mean every single component has redundancy. Plus it runs the super fast IBM Power10 CPU!

It's surely unaffordable for us pro-consumers but hey we all can dream one day Raptor come out with a Power10 workstation/

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZdsWebj9Jw

48

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.5

« on: August 27, 2023, 06:08:10 pm »

It's finally out! https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-65-features

Unfortunately it does not have much changes related to OpenPOWER. One change with Power10 is DEXCR Support In and that's pretty much it

49

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] dosbox-staging -- one of the best choice for DOS gaming

« on: August 25, 2023, 07:34:58 am »

We all have heard about the JIT patch of our fellow member ClassicHasClass for the original dosbox which could be found here https://www.talospace.com/2020/01/dosbox-jit-on-ppc64le-and-how-you-can.html
His patch though not apply cleanly to the dosbox SVN trunk, however with a bit of tweak, it still work perfectly with PCPBENCH reports 28.3fps!!

Another fork of dosbox is dosbox-staging that supports PPC64LE JIT out of the box (again thanks to ClassicHasClass) is another great option but performance is not as good as that of patched JIT dosbox. The PCPBENCH can get up to 17.1fps
(ref: https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/commits/main/src/cpu/core_dynrec/risc_ppc64le.h)

I am going to dig in the source code of dosbox-staging to see how they did the PPC64LE JIT and why it is slower


EDIT: Great thanks to ClassicHasClass for the Pull Request https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/pull/2828

Now dosbox-staging can achieve 41 fps!

50

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] Can box64 run x86_64 Linux and Windows games?

« on: August 22, 2023, 07:59:32 am »

It's good to know Box64 0.24 has already supported PPC64LE.

I am curious to see how it would be able to run x86_64 titles. Firstly lets compile the app:

Code: [Select]

git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64.git
cd box64
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -PPC64LE=1 -DPAGE64K=ON
make -j32
sudo make install

NOTE: I am running Fedora 40 (rawhide) which we all know use 64K Pagesize, hence the PAGE64K is enabled.

51

General Discussion / Highpoint SSD7202 - M.2 NVME RAID card

« on: August 19, 2023, 09:04:06 pm »

Souce: https://www.highpoint-tech.com/nvme2/ssd7202

This card is around $300 USD and supporting 2 x NVME M.2. From what I know, it does not offer any binary driver / softwares for ppc64le so I have submit a Support Ticket with Highpoint to find out more details if there are open source driver in the upstream Linux kernel and how well they support ppc64le architecture.

Wondering if anyone has tried this Highpoint card?

52

Firmware / Compile blackbird firmware with upstream codes

« on: August 18, 2023, 08:49:21 am »

I've been curious about compiling the firmware by using the upstream code in the open-power repository. Today I find some spare time to do so.

The firmware from upstream has more up-to-date component, for example skiboot, linux, hostboot, buildroot, sbe, hcode, etc and I hope one day the upstream would bump linux kernel from 5.x to 6.x so I get the AMD RX 6600XT amdgpu modules loaded in Petitboot

AFAIK Fedora 38 is no good for building the firmware as I've run into so many compilation issues with buildroot. If you are to try it yourself, please use Ubuntu 22.04 ppc64le (as of August 2023). You can use https://github.com/containers/toolbox to spin up an Ubuntu 22.04 ppc64le container environment if you don't want to install Ubuntu 22.04 in QEMU.

$ sudo apt-get install cscope ctags libz-dev libexpat-dev \
   python language-pack-en texinfo gawk cpio xxd \
   build-essential g++ git bison flex unzip \
   libssl-dev libxml-simple-perl libxml-sax-perl libxml-parser-perl libxml2-dev libxml2-utils xsltproc \
   wget bc rsync
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/open-power/op-build.git
$ git checkout -b my-own-build c84a4260b7f1849dc9bb67cd1bf727cff25b4d9d # This is the latest commit as of 31 Aug 2023
$ cd op-build
$ ./op-build blackbird_defconfig && ./op-build

It will take LOOOOOOOOONG time to get the buildroot ready. Once done, the blackbird.pnor file can be found in the output/images folder.

You can now flash this firmware by following this guide

53

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] Quake 3 (ioquake3 port)

« on: August 15, 2023, 04:38:38 pm »

The game (client, server) can be compiled successfully on PPC64LE

I hope my PR would get merged:

https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/pull/613

54

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.

55

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

56

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 libXScrnSaver-devel lmdb-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


57

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

58

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

59

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/

60

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!