Topics

61

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] linux kernel 5.14 is out

« on: August 30, 2021, 06:53:46 pm »

Quick summary: https://www.talospace.com/2021/08/kernel-514.html

62

Applications and Porting / [DEV] GitLab Runner support for ppc64le is close

« on: August 18, 2021, 12:29:15 am »

Been following up with upstream progress on supporting ppc64le https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/merge_requests/2868

Once the MR is completed, this would no doubt make life easier for devs to host gitlab pipeline on linux/ppc64le

63

Applications and Porting / [DEV] GitLab Release CLI will have binary for ppc64le

« on: August 18, 2021, 12:19:29 am »

It is more convenient for ppc64le linux users who want to use this CLI to publish release

Ref: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-cli/-/merge_requests/113

64

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Debian 11 is out

« on: August 14, 2021, 07:31:36 pm »

For more details, check release notes:https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/ppc64el/release-notes/

65

Operating Systems and Porting / When could see Fedora transit to 128bit float on PPC64LE?

« on: August 01, 2021, 08:56:48 pm »

This proposal https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/PPC64LE_Float128_Transition is getting very old and no action has been done to roll this work forward. Wondering if anyone have more context on the delay?

66

Applications and Porting / [APP] CPUFetch now support POWER-based CPUs

« on: August 01, 2021, 06:17:57 pm »

Great thanks to the author for adding support for POWER-based CPUs. You could download and compile the program from GitHub https://github.com/Dr-Noob/cpufetch

67

Applications and Porting / [DEV] Fedora COPR now has partially restored some POWER8 machines for build job

« on: July 25, 2021, 08:48:03 pm »

Fedora COPR was doing migration to new datacenter last year. The move's seems to be progressing well.

From what I know, some POWER8 machines are now back online

Ref: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/9059

That means we could now build custom RPMs for Fedora with COPR again

68

General OpenPOWER Discussion / The first non-IBM OpenPOWER chip

« on: July 13, 2021, 09:03:33 pm »

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/libre-soc-releases-first-non-ibm-openpower-chip-in-decade

69

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] OpenBSD 6.9 is out

« on: May 03, 2021, 01:02:46 am »

Lots of of love for powerpc64 https://www.openbsd.org/69.html

70

Applications and Porting / [NEWS] QEMU 6.0 is out

« on: April 30, 2021, 05:32:41 am »

URL: https://www.qemu.org/2021/04/30/qemu-6-0-0/

The 2 changes related to BMC is interesting

71

User Zone / How to get toolbox CLI running on Fedora

« on: April 29, 2021, 06:06:26 am »

Toolbox is a great tooling to create development containerised dev environment. I have been using this tool on x86_64 for 2 years at work.

With ppc64le, Fedora Infrastructure team does not support PPC64LE so users
have to build the base image manually:

Code: [Select]

git clone https://github.com/containers/toolbox.git
cd toolbox/images/fedora/f34
podman build . -t fedora-toolbox:34
Once done you could specify the image in toolbox command:

Code: [Select]

toolbox create --image fedora-toolbox:34
toolbox enter

72

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 34 is out!

« on: April 27, 2021, 09:55:32 am »

More info at https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-34/

I have upgrade my Blackbird (with AMD R9 Nano GPU) from F33 to F34 successfully.

Everything works as expected though the animation of gnome-shell is sluggish.

73

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] FreeBSD 13 is out

« on: April 13, 2021, 07:25:25 pm »

Release notes: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes/

Note able changes that are related to POWER:

Code: [Select]


POWER

All powerpc architectures switched to LLVM and are currently mostly similar to amd64 toolchain-wise. 678da4a27447

powerpc (32-bit) switched to Secure-PLT. e861dab45186

powerpc64le (64-bit little endian port) was introduced, targeting POWER8 and newer processors. b75abea4d087

Radix MMU support for powerpc64 and powerpc64le (experimental, disabled by default). 65bbba25d214

Superpages support for powerpc64 and powerpc64le (experimental, disabled by default). e2d6c417e303

LinuxKPI support. 937a05ba81c3

Support QEMU/KVM pseries without hugepages. b934fc74683b

Support for handling kernel minidumps. d3c34fc0f473

Optimized memcpy, memmove, bcopy, strncpy and strcpy. e16c18650cdc, 181e35008cfb, 075fb85f0904

XIVE interrupt controller driver for POWER9, which improves performance by about 10%. d49fc192c141

Converting pmap drivers to ifunc improved performance by about 20%. 45b69dd63

Plenty of stability fixes, which fix many kernel panics.

Plenty of other performance improvements - performance during bulk -a package building is at least 60% higher.


74

Applications and Porting / [NEWS] nerdctl will ship ppc64le/s390x binary in 0.7.3

« on: March 30, 2021, 07:58:18 pm »

nerdctl is yet a new player in container engine scene. It leverages the containerd much more than Docker and offers 2 new features:

* lazy pulling
* image encryption

Though it is quite young, the project is growing steadily. In https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/pull/139, the team maintainer adds support for ppc64le.
To me it is a yet another win for Linux ppc64le community

75

Applications and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 34 Beta is out

« on: March 24, 2021, 07:41:01 pm »

Perfect timing! GNOME 40 is finally announced. Fedora 34 Beta is the perfect test bench distro for that. Please give it a go on ppc64le and file bug reports if you happen to find any

URL: https://alt.fedoraproject.org/prerelease/index.html