Messages

31

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.

32

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 :-)

33

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: critical mass of developers

« on: November 09, 2020, 06:58:01 am »

We need to increase the community size. The critical enabler was to have machines to buy, Raptor CS did that (I don't see why IBM did not, as it is really correlated with the success of the architecture). There are some Linux distributions. Now the sell process might be easier, at least in Europe (but will that also mean cheaper?). Fixing and improving apps will help to bring this ecosystem at a user level.
I don't know about the big upstream communities but providing patches to other open source projects will make POWER more visible ... what may make it more attractive.

About old hardware, do you think about ppc64-le hardware only or not?

34

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

« on: November 09, 2020, 06:42:26 am »

I still don't own a Power9 machine but I would like too ... That's great if it becomes easier to order for european people (I live in France).

@vikings.thum My first choice would be a BlackBird but ... will they be available in a near future?

@pocock Your feedback on user applications is very valuable. I was also looking for opportunities to work with Linux On POWER (as a freelancer) but I've always flet uncomfortable with BountySource, as we never know which bounty is really still open or not (with people saying "I'm working on that", with often weak descriptions of what has to be done, ...).

35

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Possibility to install Amiga OS 4

« on: March 12, 2020, 05:50:48 am »

That would be great to have AmigaOS running on Blackbird! At the moment, I think that's only possible under emulation ... with qemu since the support of the Sam460 config seems to be good enough. I would like to try ... when I will have a Blackbird (not ordered yet and I don't know when it will happen).

I didn't have the same negative feedback from the X5000. About the price, unfortunately, this is mainy due to the small amount of units produced.

I agree that some choices were unfortunate, notably about the CPU choices. And in my opinion, a reduced number of boards or variants have been better.

36

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Possibility to install Amiga OS 4

« on: March 10, 2020, 04:33:47 am »

Globally, the user instruction set is compatible whatever the processor. And the effort on PowerISA, for years, tends to consolidate and officialize a single ISA, with processors complying with a version or another (some PowerPC processor don't comply why any versions of the PowerISA).

I would say that the main differences concern the processor implementation (priviledged instructions, cache and MMU management, ...) but the processor support is not enough, there are also to manage the boot and the devices (always new drivers to write).

37

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Possibility to install Amiga OS 4

« on: March 09, 2020, 06:02:34 am »

I confirm that there is no port of AmigaOS 4 on POWER machines. That would be great even if the OS will use a small part of the hardware resources.
And even a BlackBird will be very expensive for this exclusive usage.

@MauryG5 I've never heard about a restriction like the one you described. AmigaOne XE is an old model of NG machines (that is to say standalone PPC motherboards).

38

User Zone / Re: PowerPC / POWER benchmarks from OpenBenchmarking (Phoronix-Test-Suite / PTS)

« on: February 14, 2020, 09:58:09 am »

What do you want to compare?
Is there a specific feature you wanted to test?

39

Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Old stuff survey

« on: January 28, 2020, 04:45:07 am »

Just out of curiosity, do you also have a MPC86xx-RDB or T4240-RDB from Freescale? If so, maybe you can do some benchmarks with the Phoronix Test Suite?

Unfortunately, no, I don't. T4240-RDB would be nice. If I had the opportunity (time) to contribute to the PPC laptop project, I would have been open to get one but that's not the case. Maybe if I find other projects related to this board ...

40

Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Old stuff survey

« on: January 27, 2020, 10:03:33 am »

Hi, this is my first message on this forum!

I am a PPC user and developer for a long time, on Linux and AmigaOS. I love the architecture and own several PPC machines: MacMini, iMac G5, X1000 and other Amiga machines, and various old development boards.
I plan to buy a BlackBird ... on which I would like to port and optimize some apps.