Messages

136

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Linux kernel packages 5.9.6 for Debian buster with 4k page size available

« on: January 05, 2021, 07:49:51 am »

For the firmware, can you please show me the output confirming which firmware you already have?

For using the kernel on Fedora: this is not what I would regard as a supported installation, it is a hack.  What you can try to do:

a) unpack the 5.9 Debian kernel package in a temporary location (use dpkg -X)

b) repack it into a tar file

c) copy the tar file into a Fedora system

d) untar the file in Fedora

e) manually copy the files into the correct places on Fedora, for example, copy the vmlinux and initrd file to /boot and copy the modules to /lib/modules, be careful not to overwrite any other files in those places or Fedora may not boot again

f) on the next boot, in petitboot, manually edit the petitboot settings to use the vmlinux and initrd file

This is unsupported from either Debian or Fedora but it may let you test.  In the Fedora environment, everything else will be much newer than in Debian, you will already have newer mesa, newer Xorg, newer firmware, maybe the RX 5700 will work.

Fedora's wiki provides instructions for building the kernel as an RPM, this might be a better way to proceed.  It is not very difficult.  The only thing you need to change in the official package is this one line:

Code: [Select]

CONFIG_PPC_64K_PAGES=n

According to search results people did get the RX 5700 working on Debian buster on x86 / 4k.  One of them mentions firmware.  You can try to download and install the firmware update like this:

Code: [Select]

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -t buster-backports firmware-linux-nonfree


137

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Linux kernel packages 5.9.6 for Debian buster with 4k page size available

« on: January 04, 2021, 03:26:35 pm »

Wayland: yes, Debian enables it by default.  If you remove the '#' in the config, that disables it

For the firmware, for an RX 5700, I think that you want to make sure it is a 2020 firmware package.  If you have the 2019 firmware package that may not be OK.

For Big Navi, RX 6800 / RX 6900, the 2020 firmware package may not be sufficient, it may require the next firmware package or a manual installation of the firmware from Git.

138

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Linux kernel packages 5.9.6 for Debian buster with 4k page size available

« on: January 04, 2021, 03:07:08 pm »

Can you please share the output of this command too:

Code: [Select]

$ dpkg -l | grep firmware-


Your system might have an old firmware package.  You can download firmware packages directly from the Debian servers, for example, using the links here to find the *.deb files

Did you also try to disable Wayland in your gdm config to see if that makes it work?

To remove the 5.9 kernel with 64k page size:

Code: [Select]

$ sudo dpkg --purge linux-image-5.9.0-0.bpo.2-powerpc64le linux-image-powerpc64le


139

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: January 04, 2021, 11:44:59 am »

Please have a good look at my comments comparing Blackbird with Talos II Lite

Basically, for anybody choosing between Blackbird and the Talos II Lite, I feel that Talos II Lite is the better choice.  It only costs a little bit more, maybe 10% extra but it gives you 4 memory channels and supports up to 22 core CPUs.

The new Radeon RX 6800 XT appears to be an optimal choice for multi-seat, multi-monitor or graphics-intensive workloads.  Unfortunately, it is wider than 2 slots.  If you put it in a Blackbird then it overhangs the 8x slot.  On a Talos II Lite, the 16x slot is on the other side so a large GPU doesn't overhang the 8x slot.

The Talos II Lite mainboard is in stock

The web site doesn't give a bundle price but you can email Raptor and ask them if they will offer a bundle.

140

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Linux kernel packages 5.9.6 for Debian buster with 4k page size available

« on: January 04, 2021, 04:22:00 am »

Do you want me to provide you with a 4k version of the 4.19 kernel?  That is what I am currently running myself, I have the RX 580 GPU so I don't need the 5.x series kernels yet.

Before I give you a command to remove the 5.9 (64k) kernel, can you please show me the output of this command:

Code: [Select]

$ dpkg -l | grep linux-image

The mesa package is now ready, this is how you install it, notice you have to add an additional APT source and use the update command before dist-upgrade:

Code: [Select]

$ sudo -i
# cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debify.list << EOF
deb http://apt.debify.org/debify debify-buster-backports-mesa main contrib non-free
EOF
# exit
$ sudo apt update
Get:12 http://apt.debify.org/debify debify-buster-backports/main ppc64el Packages [69.4 kB]
27 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.




$ sudo apt -d dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libegl-dev libgl-dev libgles-dev libglx-dev libopengl-dev
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libegl-mesa0 libegl1 libegl1-mesa libegl1-mesa-dev libgbm-dev libgbm1 libgl1 libgl1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dri libglapi-mesa libgles1 libgles2
  libgles2-mesa-dev libglvnd-core-dev libglvnd-dev libglvnd0 libglx-mesa0 libglx0 libopengl0 mesa-common-dev mesa-va-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers
22 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
Need to get 15.0 MB of archives.
After this operation, 92.2 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]



141

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: risks associated with Xorg / Wayland

« on: January 03, 2021, 11:09:46 am »

Actually, I'm hoping that some of the issues will disappear if people use the kernels produced with a regular 4k page size

Problems rooted in the 64k page size are not problems with the ppc64 platform.  Now people have both the information and the choice to use 4k like other architectures.  If a particular fault occurs with 64k and not with 4k, then it is a Wayland fault or something in the drivers.  Nonetheless, the vast majority of users will probably want to use the 4k page size rather than waiting for everybody else to support 64k.

Beyond that, I'm also hoping that Wayland developers will take feedback from users on every platform.

Based on my experience with the way systemd was imposed on the world, speaking as a developer, a sysadmin and a user, I feel that we were used as guinea pigs and I feel we may go through a similar experience with Wayland.  On Debian jessie, the first Debian release to use systemd by default, I encountered a range of issues.  Even today, on systems upgraded to the latest Debian, I still find issues that can be traced back to the introduction of systemd.

142

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Linux kernel packages 5.9.6 for Debian buster with 4k page size available

« on: January 03, 2021, 10:50:10 am »

I put the mesa packages into the build server, it takes time to build but I think they'll be ready tomorrow or Tuesday.

For Fedora: can you please ask on the fedora-devel list if anybody in their kernel team can copy what I did here to simultaneously build both 64k and 4k flavours of the kernel for Debian?

On the Debian system, you can check which kernels are installed like this (notice I begin by checking which kernel is active):

Code: [Select]

$ uname -a
Linux ws3 4.19.0-10-powerpc64le-4k #1 SMP Debian 4.19.132-2 (2020-09-16) ppc64le GNU/Linux
$ dpkg -l | grep linux-image
ii  linux-image-4.19.0-10-powerpc64le-4k                        4.19.132-2                                   ppc64el      Linux 4.19 for Little-endian 64-bit PowerPC (4k page size)

You can remove a kernel package from the system like this but please don't try to remove the kernel that is currently active, you need to reboot into a different kernel before you run the command:

Code: [Select]

$ sudo dpkg --purge linux-image-4.19.0-10-powerpc64le-4k


I'm not a developer like you unfortunately ...

If you play with this platform for long enough you will be a developer too.

143

Applications and Porting / Re: OBS 26.1.0 packages available

« on: January 02, 2021, 03:57:04 pm »

I've updated the OBS package to include the fix for this bug, so it will work with v4l2-loopback

To use the v4l2-loopback, you install it like this:

Code: [Select]

sudo apt install v4l2loopback-dkms v4l2loopback-utils

and before using OBS, you need to load the module like this:

Code: [Select]

sudo modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1

Please note this DKMS kernel module is for the 4.19 kernel.  There is an update to make it work with 5.x kernels but it needs to be backported.  I'll probably do that later in the week, it will be essential for those who want to use the packages of the 5.9 kernel for 4k page size

144

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Linux kernel packages 5.9.6 for Debian buster with 4k page size available

« on: January 02, 2021, 11:19:34 am »

Thanks for this detailed feedback

The next step may be to try updating the packages for mesa.  This is definitely required for the new RX 6800 family.

Notice that Debian buster (currently stable) only has mesa 18.3.6 but bullseye (the next release, testing) has 20.2.6

Phoronix wrote that mesa 20.2 is the minimum for RX 6000

This article also suggests mesa 19.2 is needed for RX 5700

If I can provide a new mesa package for you, do you want to try it?

To summarize, I think that the combination of these three things might be the solution on Debian:

• recent kernel
• 4k page size
• mesa 19.2 or greater

As Fedora releases are more frequent they already have some coverage for this but not the 4k page size.

You could manually copy the kernel with 4k page size into Fedora and see if it boots or you could try to build a Fedora custom kernel with 4k page size: based on your partial progress with the 4k page size on Debian, this might get you over the line in Fedora.

145

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Debian

« on: January 02, 2021, 02:21:09 am »

As promised, the kernel with 4k page size is now available for Debian, please try it, I'm curious to know if this fixes problems with the Radeon RX 5700

When you boot into the new kernel, you can verify the page size like this:

Code: [Select]

$ getconf PAGESIZE
4096


146

Operating Systems and Porting / Linux kernel packages 5.9.6 for Debian buster with 4k page size available

« on: January 02, 2021, 02:18:27 am »

As promised, the packaged version of the kernel is now available for people who want to test the 4k page size.  There is another thread tracking problems related to the 64k page size, in other words, reasons you might want to try the kernel here with 4k

Debian kernel packaging tools allow me to build multiple flavours of the kernel as separate packages and you can install all of them concurrently.  Therefore, you can install the default kernel with 64k page size and also the kernel with 4k page size at the same time.  When you boot, the grub menu will let you choose between these different kernels.

If you didn't already use any of the packages from the Debify repository then you need to enable the repository with this command:

Code: [Select]

$ wget -O - http://apt.debify.org/add-apt-debify | bash

After enabling the repository, you can get the new kernel with these two apt commands:

Code: [Select]

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install -t debify-buster-backports linux-image-powerpc64le-4k
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  linux-image-5.9.0-0.bpo.2-powerpc64le-4k
Suggested packages:
  linux-doc-5.9 debian-kernel-handbook mkvmlinuz
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  linux-image-5.9.0-0.bpo.2-powerpc64le-4k linux-image-powerpc64le-4k
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 10 not upgraded.
Need to get 40.3 MB of archives.
After this operation, 240 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]



Please share any feedback about using the package

147

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: risks associated with Xorg / Wayland

« on: December 29, 2020, 05:08:15 pm »

These are positive signs and I suspect there will be enough time to improve these things more before Xorg ever gets dropped by any distributions.

Personally, I found that the display wouldn't work for me with Wayland enabled in gdm.  I'm using an AMD GPU, the RX 580 and it has been very stable with Xorg.

For more widespread adoption of the platform, which will give it more critical mass, not everybody will want to go through a text prompt.  This type of hack is fine for some of us and helps prove what can and will work eventually though.

148

Applications and Porting / Re: trying the ffmpeg POWER9 optimization patch

« on: December 29, 2020, 04:30:27 pm »

The source packages are in the Debify repository so you can always do

Code: [Select]

apt update
apt source ffmpeg

to see the exact source it was built from.  Patches are in the debian/patches directory of any package.

Make sure it really downloads the source from debify and not the regular package from Buster.

In this case, I can point you to the patches on Gitlab as well, there is also a copy in the ffmpeg trac issue.  I had to tweak it to resolve the compiler errors that are mentioned in trac, the version in Gitlab compiles without errors.

149

General OpenPOWER Discussion / risks associated with Xorg / Wayland

« on: December 29, 2020, 11:08:08 am »

There is regular noise about Linux distributions being on the cusp of abandoning Xorg, e.g. the recent Phoronix article about Xorg being abandonware, which generated many blogs and comments on various platforms.

Talos II and Blackbird users have commented that Wayland isn't working for us.  I personally use Xorg right now, I have this in my /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf

Code: [Select]

[daemon]
# Uncomment the line below to force the login screen to use Xorg
WaylandEnable=false


Has anybody investigated the Wayland issues on this architecture in any depth?

I don't see any distribution dropping Xorg in the next 12 months but as these machines have a long lifespan, if Xorg is dropped in 2 or 3 years from now then it will be an inconvenience for this platform.

150

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Debian

« on: December 29, 2020, 10:02:30 am »

I will publish a 5.9 kernel built with the 4k page size, I think it is a really good idea to try that.

It will be available as a Debian package so you can install it very easily along with any other Debian kernels and choose between them when you boot.

I'm really interested to know if this fixes the problem for you.

It may be some time next week, I'll post an update here when it is available.