Topics

1

Operating Systems and Porting / Swiss finance regulator FINMA deputy CEO resigns, collateral damage from Debian?

« on: February 04, 2026, 01:57:33 pm »

When the Debianists first attacked the Software Freedom Institute in November 2021, I asked the legal insurance provider to assist me.  They failed to do their job.  I only publish this here because other people have raised questions about judgments.  In fact, there was no valid judgment.  In the absence of legal insurance, I simply canceled the trademark and neutralized the dispute.

If there are legal fees to be paid or reimbursed, the money should have been paid by the insurance company.

Moreover, I was able to prove the financial regulator knew about deficiencies in the illegal legal insurance scheme for a very long time.

I published the most compelling evidence between January 2025 and March 2025 on the site JuristGate.com.  Not only did the regulator fail to protect the public but it looks like they even took an active role in the cover up too.

The head of insurance supervision, who was also deputy head of FINMA, resigned after I put the emphasis on the cover-up.  They did not provide a reason for the resignation.  So I simply published the sequence of events and I let people draw their own conclusions about whether she resigned due to the way I reverse engineered a cover-up.

MIT DEDP MicroMasters online learner's blog post about cover-up linked to resignation of Swiss financial regulator

2

Operating Systems and Porting / $15B federal lawsuit vs. Google astroturfing in open source communities

« on: February 03, 2026, 10:00:38 am »

GiveSendGo, which is known for resisting censorship and supporting controversial legal disputes, hosts a new crowdfunding campaign about social engineering and black money in open source communities, in other words, astroturfing.

Here is the link to share.  Some platforms are censoring it already.  It will only succeed if people use email, DM and other means to share the link.  The greylisting of this particular topic reveals a lot about social control media and the pestering campaigns.

https://www.givesendgo.com/censorship-privacy

The law suit has been filed in the same court hosting Nicolas Maduro. 70,000 internal emails from debian-private and diversity programs have been offered when crowdfunding milestones are reached, even if the case fails. Open source leaders will be subject to depositions about payments they received from the controlling corporations before denouncing various people over the years. Only if the community contributes enough money to fund the lawyers, they are not volunteers.

Click to see the video and campaign details

3

Operating Systems and Porting / Phil Wyett & Debian harassment

« on: August 19, 2025, 08:30:06 am »

On Sunday, Phil Wyett revealed he is another victim of cyberbullying in the Debian environment.  They were benefiting from his work every day but he didn't feel valued and he has quit.

A lot of people reached out to me after seeing news about Phil.  I don't have time to answer people personally but I did create a summary of the Phil Wyett & Debian controversy on my blog.

Have a look at the screenshot at the bottom, the huge number of packages he co-maintained.  He was very active on the debian-mentors list helping other newcomers.

I'm also updating the full history of Debian, based on debian-private.  New things are added into the timeline at least once per month.

For every one person who suffers like this, there are probably another 20 people who quit very quietly or don't join at all.

The impact of this decline is more acute for projects like POWER porting (and any other non-x86 architecture) because we don't have a lot of people here in the first place.

This is not about Phil and it was never about me either.

4

General OpenPOWER Discussion / police rumors, Talos II sold

« on: February 10, 2025, 05:20:32 pm »

Around FOSDEM, various people asked me about the "police" smear campaign.  It is extremely offensive to my family.  I actually resigned from some of my voluntary responsibilities around the time my father died.  It has nothing to do with police.

Jonathan Carter does not want every Debian author to have an equal chance in the elections.  FSFE even canceled their Fellowship elections.  Nonetheless, these people have no right to make defamation around the death of my father.

I put photographs on my blog.  People can look at the evidence in the photographs.

a) police arrested two Outreachy interns in Zurich, Switzerland and now the same two Albanian women were in close proximity to the crisis about Sonny Piers at GNOME

b) Switzerland is planning to ban Swastikas.  I photographed a Swiss woman with a Swastika tattoo but I have no connection to this woman or Nazism.  It is an odd coincidence, but my birthday is the Kristallnacht.

I used to row with a police officer.  He is one of the legends of policing in Australia and he won emergency practitioner of the year, a real life version of John McClane from Die Hard.  I have a lot of respect for the people who serve in the police and the military so I do not publish their names or other identifying details, nonetheless, it is a true story.

I sold both of my Talos II workstations but I was also very pleased with the reliability and features of the platform.  I am still interested in finding positive ways to ensure my open source development work is compatible with the POWER architecture and easily accessible to those people who choose any of the non-x86 architectures such as POWER and ARM64.

5

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Irish elections, CPU manufacturing, multinationals and the IPFS in elections

« on: November 28, 2024, 09:03:46 am »

Irish elections are tomorrow and one of the big issue is the state dependency on tax revenue from multinationals

There are many discussions that can be started about multinationals but the one topic I want to mention here is the presence of Intel's CPU manufacturing plant on the edge of Dublin and the supply chain that supports them.

People are asking how Ireland can broaden its revenue streams by having a more diverse range of companies.  Nonetheless, it makes sense to have companies that use the existing supply chains and skills.  This gives more options for tech workers when they want to change jobs.

Has anybody heard anything recently about anybody other than IBM wanting to engage in OpenPOWER chip production?

Does anybody have any general comments on the possibility of somebody producing RISC V in Ireland or is RISC V still a pipe dream?

At the same time, there is a a new category on my blog for IPFS and some posts about how this tool has been used and useful in elections.

6

General OpenPOWER Discussion / the Swiss harassment judgment, how it actually started

« on: October 21, 2024, 03:50:51 am »

After I made the post about selling my Talos II workstations, I received more queries about how the rumors about a harassment judgment really started back in 2018.

Therefore, I have now published the judgment and recordings from the trial in Zurich

One thing that is clear, the harassment was sometimes occurring when I was not even there.  I would sometimes be away for 1 or 2 weeks with my work. Carla would be alone with the cats and this racist Swiss landlady would make them feel really bad with her paw behavior.  My absences at the time are actually confirmed by the lawyers from the other side, they thought they had to harass Carla because I was not there and difficult to contact.  It is really incredulous that Debian people intruded and starting spreading rumors about harassment after this happened.

7

General OpenPOWER Discussion / for sale: two workstations, Talos II dual CPU / Radeon RX580 8GB

« on: October 04, 2024, 08:49:29 am »

Hi all,

My Talos II systems have worked very well for a number of years

I recently had some experiences with BIOS updates on hardware from another vendor.  The vendor requires people to have accounts, support contracts and running a specific operating system to run some utilities.  As the hardware had a very old BIOS firmware it couldn't update directly to the current version.  It was a huge hassle and it reminded me of the benefits of having things like petitboot and open source BIOS code.

Nonetheless, it feels foolish for me to spend time testing the platform and creating patches when some people are undermining collaboration in larger Linux distributions.

With that in mind I'm looking to sell the two workstations.  I will probably spend more of my time on other areas of open source.  By purchasing the workstations, you are indirectly supporting my work in other areas.

I can sell them whole or to reduce shipping costs I could remove them from the cases and sell the combination of motherboard/CPU/heatsink/memory without case/GPU.

Full specifications and proposed prices below.  Offers will be considered.

Regards,

Daniel



Workstation B, build price approx EUR 5,400, sell for EUR 3,500, buy only Talos II motherboard/two CPUs/HSF/RAM only EUR 2,900 :

Motherboard/Dual CPU/HSF bundle	Raptor	T2P9D01	1
Heat sink fan (HSF) – 3U	IBM	01KL960	2
CPU in bundle – 4-core POWER9 3.8GHz	IBM	CP9M01	2	dual CPU
SATA controller			1
CD/DVD ROM drive			1
RAM ECC 16GB DDR4-2666			8	(total: 128GB, spread over all eight channels for maximum performance)
Case	Corsair	Carbide Series Air 540 Cube	1
PSU	Seasonic	Prime TX 850	1
Fans	Noctua	NF-A14 chromax black swap	3
GPU	AMD / Saphhire	Radeon RX580 8GB	1

(SOLD) Workstation A, build price over EUR 6500, sell for EUR 4,500, buy only Talos II motherboard/two CPUs/HSF/RAM only EUR 3,800 (SOLD):

Motherboard/Dual CPU/HSF bundle	Raptor	T2P9D01	1
Heat sink fan (HSF) – 3U	IBM	01KL960	2
CPU - 8-core POWER9 3.8Ghz	IBM	CP9M32	2	dual CPU
RAM ECC 16GB DDR4-2666	Samsung	M393A2K40CB2-CTD	8	(total: 128GB, spread over all eight channels for maximum performance)
Case	Fractal	Define 7 XL	1
PSU	Seasonic	Prime TX 850	1
GPU	AMD / Saphhire	Radeon RX580 8GB	1
GPU riser	Fractal		1

8

General Discussion / HP printers and the hplip plugin

« on: July 04, 2024, 04:32:20 am »

Some HP printers need a binary plugin

The hplip (open source package) tool can download the plugin directly from HP

The plugin is an x86 binary

At some point HP added support for ARM

In some cases, the printer and flatbed scanner will work fine without the plugin but to use more advanced features, e.g. the ADF duplex mode, you need to have the plugin.

Does anybody have any experience with this issue, for example:

- is there any printer/scanner/ADF setup that gives a completely or as much as possible free experience?

- can the plugin be executed with an emulator?

- did anybody already raise a support request with HP for a ppc64el binary of the plugin?

9

Operating Systems and Porting / Debian security standards, deflecting questions about SSH2 issue

« on: July 03, 2024, 11:38:27 am »

The Talos II and Blackbird have been marketed as a platform for security-minded users and many people have purchased the platform with that in mind.

Security is only as good as the weakest link in the chain.  It is no good having the most secure hardware if there are regular defects in the OS or web browser or some other level in the stack.

I've recently started blogging about Debian's handling of security issues.

This is not a new concern: in 2008, it was the OpenSSL random number generator and some people still have vulnerable keys in use today, 16 years later.

The new revelation is that in March 2000, Edward Brocklesby took over the SSH2 package and uploaded new binaries into Debian

Six weeks later and in April 2000 Brocklesby was secretly expelled for hacking

The Debian Social Contract, point 3 tells us "we won't hide problems".  I felt the social contract compelled me to bring this SSH2 affair into the public domain at the beginning of June 2024.  Andreas Tille has made four more "Statement on Daniel Pocock" insult responses in barely four weeks, two of them on web sites and two by spam emails.  Somebody commented that Debian never had such a big hissy fit.

Nonetheless, these hissy fits reveal a lot about the culture.  I made a chronological review of the culture so people can see it is not about me, the series of suicides and other deaths, with evidence, suggest it is about the mindset of the group.  For people who have to answer everything with a new "Statement on Daniel Pocock", what we see is that being stubborn is more important than being secure.

The Brocklesby affair may be 24 years ago but it actually reveals a continuity.  We can measure subsequent security incidents against the Brocklesby affair and see that each time Debian is tested, the responses are lackluster.

10

Operating Systems and Porting / hibernate / resume / suspend-to-disk (STD) doesn't need hardware support?

« on: June 05, 2023, 06:01:33 am »

I already started another thread here about all the suspend modes, including suspend to RAM and the special modes of the POWER9 architecture.  I'm starting this new thread to focus on hibernate, in other words, suspend-to-disk (STD)

There is a section about hibernation in the official Linux kernel guide.  They state:

Hibernation

This state (also referred to as Suspend-to-Disk or STD) offers the greatest energy savings and can be used even in the absence of low-level platform support for system suspend.

This means it doesn't matter if POWER9 or the motherboard (Talos II, Blackbird, Condor) have any hardware support for hibernation.  The suspend and resume work is all done by the operating system.

The kernel guide goes on to state:

However, it requires some low-level code for resuming the system to be present for the underlying CPU architecture.

Is that code already available in any newer kernels?

Is that code available in any alternative operating system like FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

I did a check on one of my own systems and it doesn't appear to support it, disk is missing from the output:

$ cat /sys/power/state
freeze mem

Here is the same command on an Intel host, notice the disk support is listed there:

$ cat /sys/power/state
freeze mem disk

11

General Discussion / Samsung PM9A1 IcyBox IB-PCI208-HS not working in one Talos II, OK in the other

« on: September 14, 2022, 01:29:19 pm »

For my first workstation, I purchased two Samsung PM9A1 (1TB) SSDs and I purchased two of the IcyBox IB-PCI208-HS cards to put them into PCIe slots.  They worked immediately and I've had them for 11 months without any problem

Now I purchased two of the PM9A1 (2TB) SSDs and two more identical IB-PCI208-HS cards.  These are only showing up intermittently or not at all when the machine boots.

In petitboot there is a lot of kernel error logging like this:

Code: [Select]

[  937.395593] EEH: Recovering PHB#1-PE#fd
[  937.395607] EEH: PE location: UOPWR.A100029-Node0-CPU1 Slot1 (8x), PHB location: N/A
[  937.395609] EEH: This PCI device has failed 1 times in the last hour and will  be permanently disabled after 5 failures.
[  937.395611] EEH: Notify device drivers to shutdown
[  937.395614] EEH: Beginning: 'error_detected(IO frozen)'
[  937.395620] PCI 0001:01:00.0#00fd: EEH: Invoking nvme->error_detected(IO frozen)
[  937.395627] nvme nvme0: frozen state error detected, reset controller
[  937.578659] PCI 0001:01:00.0#00fd: EEH: nvme driver reports: 'need reset'
[  937.578662] EEH: Finished:'error_detected(IO frozen)' with aggregate recovery state:'need reset'
[  937.578667] EEH: Collect temporary log
[  937.578698] EEH: of node=0001:01:00.0
[  937.578702] EEH: PCI device/vendor: ffffffff
[  937.578706] EEH: PCI cmd/status register: ffffffff
[  937.578707] EEH: PCI-E capabilities and status follow:
[  937.578722] EEH: PCI-E 00: ffffffff ffffffff ffffffff ffffffff

I tried some of the following with no luck:

- removing the cards and re-inserting them in different slots

- removing the SSDs and putting them back into the cards

- upgrading the FPGA on the second workstation from 0xa to 0xc (v1.08) so that it matches the first workstation

- upgrading the PNOR on the second workstation to the v2.01 beta so that it matches the first workstation

- putting a new and bigger PSU on the second workstation (I needed to do this anyway for bigger GPU and more RAM)

- removing the GPU and everything else from the system and trying one SSD at a time

12

General OpenPOWER Discussion / external oscillator in v1.01 boards - which problems does it aim to resolve?

« on: September 14, 2022, 11:34:52 am »

The wiki mentions that newer boards (v1.01) have an external oscillator for the FPGA

The oscillator is mentioned in this commit

If somebody has an older FPGA, e.g. 1.06 and they have a v1.01 motherboard, is there a pressing reason to upgrade the FPGA to 1.08?

Are there any particular problems that might occur if the user does not upgrade?

13

Operating Systems and Porting / Debian / GNOME default sleep settings: guaranteed crash

« on: September 13, 2022, 04:10:00 pm »

I did a fresh Debian install on one system and then left it at the GNOME login screen while making a phone call.

When I came back, the screen was frozen, SSH was not working any more but the CPUs and fans still active.

I rebooted it, checked the log and found that it had tried to sleep and managed to become frozen.

It is probably a good idea to track this with bug reports in both Debian and GNOME and change their default settings on ppc64le.

However, is there anything that can be done at a lower level, for example, in the kernel, to reject the sleep attempt rather than letting the system get into this frozen state?  If that could make it appear stable for every OS it would be much better than fixing it in one distribution at a time.

It was kind of obvious to me what had happened before I even looked in the logs but I can imagine some users might get a fright

14

General OpenPOWER Discussion / USB keyboards not working in petitboot bootloader environment

« on: September 13, 2022, 02:59:48 pm »

On one of my machines, I notice that it doesn't respond to the USB keyboard when I am in the bootloader.  I haven't tested the other machine yet.

Normally I control these workstations through SSH to the BMC and it is a long time since I tried using a directly connected keyboard so I don't even remember if this worked before

I tried two different keyboards.  Both keyboards work fine with other workstations.

When Linux and GNOME boots on the Talos II, the keyboard begins working

In the bootloader config, I found an option to choose between hvc0 and tty1 consoles.  I don't know if that should make any difference but I tried both settings and it didn't help.

15

Operating Systems and Porting / OpenBSD: Talos II / Xorg / amdgpu Radeon RX 580

« on: September 01, 2022, 04:59:28 am »

I decided to make another test of OpenBSD using the nightly build from 29 August that I found here.

The system is Talos II, dual CPU, 128GB and AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB.  Is this GPU currently supported on OpenBSD ppc?

I looked at the instructions here in the FAQ for X setup

Code: [Select]

# rcctl enable xenodm
# rcctl start xenodm

# pkg_info

amdgpu-firmware-20220708 firmware binary images for amdgpu(4) driver


Looking at the log, the X server is failing to run

Code: [Select]

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log

[    19.833] (--) no aperture driver access: only wsfb driver useable
[    20.049] (EE)
Fatal server error:
[    20.049] (EE) xf86OpenConsole: No console driver found
Supported drivers: wscons
Check your kernel's console driver configuration and /dev entries(EE)
[    20.049] (EE)
Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support
at http://wiki.x.org
 for help.
[    20.049] (EE) Please also check the log file at
"/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information.
[    20.049] (EE)
[    20.050] (EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.