Messages

16

Applications and Porting / Re: Porting Overte and QTWebEngine

« on: May 28, 2026, 08:59:30 am »

Thanks for sharing. Looks like a very cool project. I am not familiar with Qt so even if I want to lend you a helping hand, I am unsuitable for the job. Having said that I am more than happy to help with testing or review any changes that might related to V8 (as I have a bit of exposure to Chromium side)

17

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: May 10, 2026, 10:34:34 pm »

tle: ppc64 is POWER8+ only, no PPC970/ PA6T?

Only POWER ISA 2.7+ and Little Endian only at this stage. I do plan to support Big Endian but the amount of work would be triple (POWER8, POWER9 and POWER10 fast paths all need to be carefully revised and tested).

Both BE and LE paths are supported as of Firefox 153 release

I wish I could offer support for PPC970/PA6T but lacking of real hardware would make it very hard for me to pick up many issues.

18

Firmware / Re: Firmware 2.10 for Talos-II and Blackbird available

« on: May 10, 2026, 10:26:11 pm »

I'm pretty late to this, but the navi firmware didn't work on previous firmware versions since it was too big to fit on bootkernfw. I swapped my rx5300 out for an rx560 and loaded the polaris fw to bootkernfw, and it worked perfectly fine for me- I get a picture in petitboot, and I boot to desktop in fedora without any issues. Not sure if it's something with navi cards, or just mine in particular (I don't have any other ones I could test it with). Guess I'll just stick with the rx560 for now.

Well BOOTKERNFW partition was intended to workaround the ever-growing kernel image size, it's interesting that you say it would not be able to fit the firmware. Btw I highly recommend you try to build the upstream open-power firmware version (please see my branch https://github.com/runlevel5/op-build/tree/amdgpu-navi23 and adapt to whatever amdgpu firmware blob you prefer and compile the firmware from scratch). Please notes there has been discrepancies between Raptor's downstream and open-power upstream version. The first major change is that upstream version does NOT use BOOTKERNFW (that means maintainers have to adjust size offset to make everything within size budget). Other changes are:

Code: [Select]

### Firmware components
| Component | open-power upstream | Raptor (Raptor GitLab fork) |
|---|---|---|
| hostboot | `6b6646f0` (2026-03-10) | `a98d7347` (2024-02-15 era) |
| skiboot | `v7.1-131-g9abbfe67df5b` | `ecb1dc7c` |
| hcode | `hw091323a.opmst` | `9b705d0e` |
| sbe | `e66523bb` | `f5dcee93` |
| occ | `3515ab0e` | `9ddc6ba5` |
| petitboot | 1.15 (release tarball) | `695b1d97` (git pin from fork) |
| machine-xml | (per-platform tree) | `e782e308` (Blackbird) / `cbd11e94` (Talos II) |
| libflash | follows skiboot | `ecb1dc7c` (same as skiboot fork) |
| openpower-ffs | `3ec70fbc` | `3ec70fbc` (**identical**) |
| openpower-pnor | `3e9fa97d` (open-power/pnor) | `92c0451c` (**Raptor's pnor fork**) |
| ima-catalog | `89e00ee3` | `3d30c7ac` |
| ppe42-gcc | `b4772a9f` | `84a6a88e` |
| ppe42-binutils | `c615a89c` | `2552229791` |
| capp-ucode | `p9-dd2-v4` | `p9-dd2-v4` (same tag, separately hosted) |
| pnv-lpc | not pinned | `90e170ca` |
| ocmb-explorer-fw | 4.0 | **REMOVED** |

### Linux kernel
| | Ours | Raptor |
|---|---|---|
| Version | 6.12.87 | v6.6.16 |
| Source | `kernel.org/.../linux-6.12.87.tar.xz` | `gitlab.raptorengineering.com/openpower-firmware/talos-op-linux` (Blackbird) or `.../common-cpu-ibm-power9/op-linux` (Talos II) — **custom fork** |
| In-tree patches | 2 (xhci, EXTRAVERSION) | 6 (xhci, EXTRAVERSION, AST palette, AST RAMDAC reset, AST DVO enable, powerpc gpr1/fpu) |
| Skiroot defconfig location | `openpower/configs/linux/skiroot_defconfig` | same |

And other patches that Raptor introduced to various components.

In summary, just give upstream a try to see if it works for you, if it does, we could propose to Raptor to find a solution for limited size of BOOTKERNFW.

P/S: It would be great if Raptor could rebase their downstream fork with upstream - lots of components are so out of date

19

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 44 officially released!

« on: May 10, 2026, 10:11:51 pm »

Kernel 7.0 is now officially available in Fedora 44. No issue so far.

20

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Upstreaming PPC64 optmisation patch for Google SKIA library

« on: May 02, 2026, 05:21:13 am »

After digging in a bit, I do not think Google would accept the patch because they have just rejected a similar patch using translation shim for LA64 architecture. Their argument is that shim wrapper is compiler locked and that's not good enough. I hope there are someone in the community who would step up to port SKIA to use native VSX instructions.

21

Applications and Porting / [DEV] Upstreaming PPC64 optmisation patch for Google SKIA library

« on: May 01, 2026, 08:12:46 pm »

In the Chromium PPC64 patchset maintaned by Tim Pearson, there is a patch tor 2D graphic lib SKIA that would boost performance by converting SSE to VSX. It turns out Firefox is also using SKIA library too and I could see a MAJOR improvement in term of FPS in Firefox after adapting the patch. I do NOT believe that Firefox would ever accept a downstream patch for a third party library so my bet is on getting the patch submitted officially. From my own testing, the patched libs work well and have not produced any bug. So just curious why the patch has not been submitted to Google yet.

22

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 44 officially released!

« on: May 01, 2026, 07:53:49 pm »

> Is DHCP working OK with your internal Ethernet ports? I can't figure out why it WON'T work in Fedora, it WILL work in Petitboot, and it DOES work if I connect a USB Ethernet adaptor and plug the network into that.

@ClassicHasClass yes it does. I am using NetworkManager btw. Are you using systemd-networkd or some dhcp clients?

23

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 28, 2026, 06:15:41 pm »

> Will this merged to next 153esr?

That's the plan. I am fixing the PPC64 Simulator on ARM64 now so the Firefox team could run the PPC64 JIT tests on their CI.

24

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 44 officially released!

« on: April 28, 2026, 06:13:58 pm »

ref: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-44-Released

> Fedora 44 ships live media improvements, enhanced AArch64 EFI system support for Windows on ARM laptops, the latest GCC 16 compiler, and many other updates like LLVM 22. Fedora 44 also has Budgie 10.10, PHP 8.5, Ruby 4.0, Boost 1.90, Golang 1.26, CMake 4.0, and more for delivering a leading-edge upstream Linux experience.

Yet another release. I've been testing Fedora 44 since the beta release and till now I could not any issue with the blackbird.

25

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

« on: April 26, 2026, 06:36:17 pm »

I am working on the Firefox JIT atm so once that's done I will re-visit this work to start filling them out incrementally.

26

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 26, 2026, 06:35:09 pm »

@carlosgonz https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox/releases/tag/alpha

EDIT: please use https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox/releases/tag/p9-may-4 instead as it is much more optimised

27

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 25, 2026, 11:38:14 pm »

Good work picking it up. Unfortunately I'm having trouble with Fedora on my Blackbird (won't DHCP through my wifi bridge), so I can't really check it right now, but I've been following the commits as they land.

Looking forward to your feedback in the Pull Request. I will freeze the codes when Firefox team cut the 151 release then proceed with upstreaming

28

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 25, 2026, 11:09:52 pm »

@carlosgonz I mean yes I could package the LE binary (built on Fedora 44). Btw I have not tested against Debian so unsure if the package would work or not (in theory it should)

29

Applications and Porting / [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: April 22, 2026, 10:59:24 pm »

Firstly, all credits go to @ClassicHasClass for his great JIT support work for the v86 Firefox (basically baseline JIT is fully working). He had submitted the patches against upstream at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860412 but unfortunately the patch has become stale and no longer work with post-140ESR codebase.

So after spending 3 weeks with help from few people in the PPC community and help of AI agents to track down errors pattern (lacking of tooling like rr-debugger made the work super hard - at one stage I was resolving to all sort of blind hypothesis and nearly gave up), I have successfully revived and fixed number of bugs of the original JIT codes. Please check out https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox/pull/1 to all members here for reviewing.

TL;DR; LE and BE path for POWER8, POWER9 and POWER10 is fully implemented (including ION JIT, WASM SIMD, JSPI and Simulator). Please give JIT work a go and let me know if you happen to find any bug. I have tried my best to hand test and ran many stress test / benchmarks and have addressed quite a number of edge cases.

So what's next? Trying to get it polished as much as possible then get it upstreamed (for release 153 - why? new ESR would be branched off this version) or simply try to get the patch accepted in downstream sources like Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu.

30

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] LuaJIT PPC64 support

« on: April 22, 2026, 09:13:46 pm »

It's painful to convince Mike to review and merge such huge delta of changes to support PPC64 JIT. It's understandable taking into consideration and assumption that Mike does not own a POWER8/9 hardware.

I think I could try to review one of those stale JIT work and get it patched downstream in Fedora. If that approach proves successful, I strongly believe Mike would likely give his blessing to the JIT port after few years of real world usage downstream.