Messages

1

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Unexpected Surprise, Debian 12 Bookworm

« on: April 25, 2023, 03:12:38 pm »

Pleased to learn that Debian 12 already works well. I stay at version 11 at the moment but of course I will upgrade when it will be official (stable).

2

Applications and Porting / Re: A set of good old games

« on: April 12, 2023, 11:02:31 am »

I'm sorry about that ... it is back online now!

3

Applications and Porting / A set of good old games

« on: April 11, 2023, 03:32:58 pm »

I have tried some games on my Talos 2 and I posted a review there: http://www.powerpc-lab.org/linux/2023/04/11/play-good-old-games-on-power9.html

Some of them are already known to work but that may provide additional information.

About the tested games, they are: ZGloom, SDLPop (Prince Of Persia), REminiscence (Flashback), Hurrican (Turrican), ScummVM, Doom, Quake, Doom 64, sm64 (Super Mario 64) and StarWars OpenJK (Jedi Academy).

4

Applications and Porting / Re: Clion, VSCode, IDE options?

« on: November 23, 2022, 03:19:30 pm »

The only thing I've found not to work is the clangd integration (which needs JetBrain's own) but everything else works great. It's a Java IDE but I guess I have to do something with my CPUs...

So, how did you get clang-tidy inspections (visible on your screenshot) as I understand they use clangd?

I found a ticket in the JetBrains bugtracker to support an ARM64 version of clangd. Someone mentions he made clangd working using qemu but the procedure seems to be too short.
I also found an article about running x86_64 executables on ppc64le but it makes me going too far ... and my Debian still has the default 64 KB pages, so it seems  there is zero chance to make all that working.

But to answer myself or anyone else wondering which native IDEs work on Power9 with Debian: Eclipse CDT and CLion, and so far I'm quite happy with CLion.

Who would not be "quite happy with CLion" :-D

5

Applications and Porting / Re: Clion, VSCode, IDE options?

« on: September 14, 2022, 05:09:44 am »

It was expected as ClassicHasClass reported that IntelliJ was working fine but I confirm it's the same with CLion, my preferred IDE 

About VSCode, I see there that the support of Linux ppc64le was requested without success.

There is a project fork with support of ppc64el but changes were made in 2019 on VSCode 1.41.1. I tried to build but that stops on an error about Python2 syntax 

6

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

« on: September 14, 2022, 03:31:36 am »

@ClassicHasClass Thanks! The chassis is a CSE-732 from MicroSemi and I have no fans except HSFs ones and the power supply. I will have to check the firmware version ... I am not yet familiar with all components.
I don't remember who much noise produces my Dual G5 that is side by side with the Talos 2  I will reboot it to install Debian 11 too (don't know when).

@MauryG5 It was reported that the problem was fixed in kernel 5.10.101 and kernel 5.11.12. And this bug was only concerning amdgpu. At the moment, I tried HD6570 that uses radeon driver. Sorry if mentionning RX550 was confusing, let's consider I have not started to test it.

7

User Zone / Re: Radeon HD7750 working on 64K PAGESIZE.

« on: September 14, 2022, 03:26:23 am »

As the topic is about Radeon HD and 64KB page size, I confirm that I have no problem with Radeon HD6570 with a default Debian 11 installation (updated to 11.5, with kernel 5.10.140). To get the display, I had to disable on-board VGA output (with a jumper cap on J10109) and to add "modprobe.blacklist=ast" to the boot commandline. In dmesg, I have the message "radeon: MSI limited to 32-bit".

8

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

« on: September 12, 2022, 07:38:30 am »

Finally, I got my Talos 2 (second hand machine) recently so I am not just a dreaming follower anymore 

I successfully installed Debian 11.4 (kernel 5.10.0-17). Hopefully I am quite familiar with Debian installer because its display was partially corrupted with truncated text and unexpected characters (I started installation with a 17" screen, not large enough?).
I tried KDE Plasma and Mate, installed tools, started to compile few programs, used Firefox a bit ... and also got display from a Radeon HD6570 (and I have received a RX550) but details about that will take place in another section of the forum.

I am not able to test audio, I will do that later. And today, I upgraded to Debian 11.5 (available for 2 days).

Everything works well so far. Ready to enjoy my machine. I just would like it to be less noisy (CPU fans).

9

Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Which strategy for old big-endian Linux machines

« on: April 20, 2022, 07:25:13 am »

... My idea was to identify if we should focus on 1 or 2 distributions in order to provide them with a good support and with a good user experience (installer, graphical desktop ...). ...

Good idea. But how would you reach that goal?

That would imply to encourage users and even actors to switch to these distributions (and drop others). I know it may appear unrealistic because everyone is attached to its distribution (even if many people would just like to find a polished distribution with an installer, a desktop, etc.). But we are at a point where there are not enough users per distribution (to provide feedback, enhancements ...) and so distributions remove support for these machines ... or slowly die.

To me, Debian is kind of mandatory, as a reference distribution.
And I would say VoidLinux was a great challenger ... before it annnouced the certain end for big-endian PPC.

With your link on OpenSUSE, that illustrates the typical case of a distribution that is possible to install but you have to find information here and there, then find how to install desktop, etc.

10

Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Which strategy for old big-endian Linux machines

« on: April 11, 2022, 04:27:27 pm »

Thank you all for your answers.

We see that there are many distributions (even more than I thought). My idea was to identify if we should focus on 1 or 2 distributions in order to provide them with a good support and with a good user experience (installer, graphical desktop ...). With all these distributions, efforts are spread and from my experience, using Linux on these machines is not straightforward:
- Ubuntu Remix was nice but old and on package updates, I was unable to restart
- Debian installed on my PowerMac but failed on my MacMini and prior to than there was a long period with the switch to grub but it was not working
- I installed VoidLinux on MacMini but it was a bit hardcore to add the configuration to choose a graphical environment and then some of them had problems (I need to install the latest version with integrated desktop)
- I looked at Fienix and MintPPC but didn't really understand how to perform installation

@Borley I am convinced that big endian PowerPC (either 32 or 63 bit systems) is not the future and in parallel, I am studying how to acquire a Raptor workstation (I would like to be rather sure I will be able to have a minimum of time to use it) ... that would be a perfect powerful machine for my freelance activity (software development) and I also would like to test software, contribute to some projects, etc.

To come back to the topic, Linux on old PPC machines is for me at a hobby level or for testing.
For others, this is the opportunity to have a mainstream OS on an machines that already runs AmigaOS4 (X1000, X5000) or MorphOS (PowerMac, X5000).
People appreciate a distribution that is quite easy to install, have a good documentation (including about limitations), can be updated ... They don't want to go here and there to find tricks for installation, and then others for graphical desktops, and then again others for the graphic hardware acceleration ...
I will not consider distributions that are too much for experts (Gentoo, Arch ...) or that are not very active. One day I will have to learn more about BSD systems and test one but really I can't do that now.

@MPC7500 Unfortunately Void Linux will drop even 64-bit flavour in big-endian. Checking this point on Talospace, I noticed that ClassicHasClass wrote "The new BE Void PPC maintainer would be responsible for doing the builds as well as fixing issues, but it should be possible to coordinate hosting the packages on an official mirror. I imagine it's negotiable to do only glibc or only 64-bit or some such depending on the hardware or interest you have."

11

Legacy POWER Hardware / Which strategy for old big-endian Linux machines

« on: April 08, 2022, 09:08:07 am »

Linux is still used on old machines (PowerMac, X1000/X5000) even if the situation is not comfortable: they are not so powerful (even more with 32-bit models),
there are some distributions but not fully supported ...

It became very problematic when Debian announced PPC wouldn't continue to be supported. Updates for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS stopped last year.
I had much hope with VoidLinux but they announced the end of their big-endian distribution.

I heard about Adelie but I thought it was not very active ... I may be wrong.
Chimera Linux will provide 64-bit BE support but at 3rd tier level.
There are other attempts like MintPPC, Fienix ...

I wonder if we should not have to focus on one or two distributions and make them strong ... if it's not too late.

So, I would like to know your opinion:

1. Do you think it is still time to want a polished distribution on these machines?
2. What would be the most promising distribution (and not for hardcore Linux hackers)?
3. Should we focus on 64-bit models only?

12

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: The Vikings store (european reseller of RaptorCS products) is open again

« on: February 25, 2022, 11:04:21 am »

Good news! I often checked in the last months, view each time new delays ... I hope that will allow more people to acquire a machine. I am still thinking about buying a Talos workstation.

13

Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Old stuff survey

« on: December 31, 2021, 04:06:40 am »

@lepidotos I am really curious about these Freescale-based PowerPC desktops ... if there is no secret there, could you get information and tell more about them?

14

General Discussion / Re: Learning POWER9 assembly

« on: November 08, 2021, 04:33:25 am »

I also have the physical book Optimizing PowerPC Code that I also recommend to be more familiar with the PowerPC instruction set in general, what is described by category (load-store, integer, FP, branches ...). The book also explains well stack frames and lists instructions with one described per pagen what includes PPC64 instructions, as this clean architecture came with 32-bit and 64-bit very early. The part on optimization is good but rather short and it may not match current POWER architecture on some points.

Another good resource I remember is "Ensamblador del PowerPC con Mac OS X". Even if it is in spanish, this document is more oriented as a tutorial.

Searching "powerpc asm tutorial" also reports good resources from IBM but not only.

15

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: European logistics / delivery, warranty returns, etc

« on: November 09, 2020, 07:05:29 am »

I'm in Suisse Romande, so we might be neighbours.

I confirm ... as I lived in the French Alps ;-)
And we share another thing: I am a Debian user.

Please see my blog about choosing between the Blackbird and the Talos II Lite.  For many people, the Talos II Lite is a much better choice and only a little bit more expensive.  You get to use a wider GPU, there is better cooling, 4 memory channels (instead of just 2 in Blackbird) and use of any POWER9 CPU (Blackbird limited to 8 cores).  The cost difference is less than €150 + the bigger case.

Thanks for information, I will look (again?) at it. That makes me reconsider by potential choice.

Note that I just want to avoid a huge case :-)