Messages

166

General Discussion / Re: Fractal Design cases

« on: October 08, 2020, 03:02:58 pm »

I ran ipmitool and I didn't see any fan speed from the built-in fan hub of the Fractal case.

I decided to try replacing one of the default 3-pin case fans with a 4-pin PWM Noctua fan

If the fan is at the rear of the case, the 30cm cable from Noctua doesn't quite reach the fan connectors on the front of the motherboard.

The fan hub has some 4-pin connectors and 3-pin connectors.  It appears that it takes the speed sensor from the first 4-pin connector and passes that back to the motherboard.  Connecting the fan to the first 4-pin connector, I was able to see the speed with ipmitool.  I tried moving it to each of the 4-pin connectors and they all report 0, it only reports the speed if it is on the first connector.

Using the fan hub in this way also solves the 30cm problem because the fan hub is at the back of the case too.

At idle, I don't believe the system is significantly quieter using the Noctua fan.  ipmitool reports that the fan is running at its slowest speed, 300 RPM.  I suspect that any noise I can hear is coming from other parts of the system and not the Noctua fan.

Overall, it is convenient being able to see the fan speed like this but maybe I could see the fan speed by using a more advanced fan hub that can monitor the 3-pin case fans.

167

General CPU Discussion / Re: POWER9 water cooling kit

« on: October 07, 2020, 08:47:43 am »

I found the IBM HSFs quiet enough when idle as well, for everything else, like office or living room situations, those HSFs are unusable IMO.

I agree a lot of people will have trouble with the HSFs

Another thing that comes to my mind is the performance of the case fans: if somebody has some very large and quiet case fans, e.g. 140mm and they move a lot of air across the HSF will the motherboard fan logic be able to reduce the HSF speeds?

Looking at the Noctua fans, for example, they are offering fans with different maximum speeds, for example, 800, 1200, 1500, I even saw one with 3000.  They will be noisy as well but will the overall noise be lower?

168

Applications and Porting / Re: Debian packaging and backport requests for OpenPOWER, Talos II, Blackbird?

« on: October 07, 2020, 06:58:11 am »

For qtwebengine, it is very easy to enable ppc64el in the Debian control file but it won't work until it is enabled in QtWebEngine itself

As commented elsewhere, I was able to build OBS, I'll test it and make the packages available shortly.

169

Applications and Porting / QtWebEngine status (depends on Chrome / Chromium patches)

« on: October 07, 2020, 06:56:35 am »

A lot of interesting things depend on QtWebEngine

QtWebEngine depends on Chromium, they periodically take a snapshot of the Chromium code from Google

Chromium patching is already in progress, is it complete?

I opened a bug for it within QtWebEngine

When somebody confirms the Chrome patches are ready, the QtWebEngine developers could enable it in their list of supported platforms.  They will probably need to know the minimum supported version of the Chromium code, they probably won't have time to look through the Chromium history, if anybody could add comments to the Qt bug report that would be really helpful.

If they can cherry-pick patches that haven't been accepted by Google, please also comment on that Qt bug report

170

Applications and Porting / Re: RStudio desktop working on Raptor's power computer (ppc64le)?

« on: October 07, 2020, 06:48:19 am »

RStudio requires qtwebengine

qtwebengine doesn't currently build for ppc64el, it may be waiting for patches in Chromium upstream

171

Talos II / Re: quiet rack mount cases e.g. water cooled or 5U, 140mm fans

« on: October 05, 2020, 04:29:11 pm »

Dune Pro is definitely an interesting alternative to the Fractal cases for tower users but it doesn't solve the rack problem in this thread.

In Switzerland, the building code says every house has to be built with a bunker.  People buy large rack mount UPSs, like the APC 1500VA or bigger and want to match them with something like Talos II in a small rack.  That is why I started this thread.  Sorry if I'm not able to idenify individual users but if you want to see the bunkers there are plenty of them, people who like hiking or motorbikes visit the mountain bunkers on weekends in summer.

172

Talos II / Re: quiet rack mount cases e.g. water cooled or 5U, 140mm fans

« on: October 05, 2020, 03:57:03 pm »

Many of the cases on that page have 120mm fans combined with some smaller fans.  I don't feel that will give the same quiet as a 140mm fan.

The only chassis with all 120mm appears to be a GPU mining chassis, it may be suitable but from the pictures it looks like the GPU slots obstruct the space for the POWER9 heatsinks

173

Talos II / quiet rack mount cases e.g. water cooled or 5U, 140mm fans

« on: October 05, 2020, 11:41:38 am »

I've had a few discussions with people about Talos II and Talos II Lite, mainly based on the recommendations in my recent blog post

One topic that comes up is that some people are space conscious and while the Fractal case is really nice and easy to use for this platform, you need to be able to access it from both sides because the HDDs / SSDs are under the motherboard and any case for the Talos II is going to be big anyway.

One of the ideas emerging from these discussions is building a small rack that can be positioned in the home or office like a chest of drawers or coffee table.  For example, such a rack could be shared between some engineers on a support desk.  A decent UPS can go in the bottom and the Talos II mounted in a large 5U case.  PDUs, network switches, etc can all be mounted on a shelf or rack mounted.  As it is not for data center, 4U to 6U for the workstation chassis is quite acceptable.

As it would combine well with other components, like a rack UPS, it suddenly starts to help save space rather than using more space.

Has anybody had experience with any server chassis between 4U - 6U that has large 140mm quiet fans and accepts regular fanless PSU?

Even if it is not so big, has anybody had any experience making a rack case operate quietly with water cooling?

174

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: any test servers for developer access?

« on: September 30, 2020, 05:32:14 pm »

Are any of those sites able to provide a graphical desktop (e.g. VNC) or they only provide shell access?

175

Operating Systems and Porting / any test servers for developer access?

« on: September 30, 2020, 02:27:56 pm »

I've been discussing a rendering bug with the Blender developers

I suspect the most efficient way for them to investigate would be having their own hardware but if that is not possible, remote access to a demo workstation at Raptor or any other user who has a spare Talos II or Blackbird right now.

Is there anybody who can help out in cases like this?

The vast majority of things I tried are working fine though.  This Blender bug is one of the few cases where something did not work.

176

Blackbird / Re: [amdgpu] [Fiji] Fedora 32 Linux kernel 5.7.x crashes

« on: September 27, 2020, 11:59:10 am »

Motorola?   Talos II + RTL-SDR is my radio

gqrx (and GNU Radio) just works installing the packages. Please remember not to plug in the RTL-SDR dongle until after you install the packages.

177

Blackbird / Re: [amdgpu] [Fiji] Fedora 32 Linux kernel 5.7.x crashes

« on: September 25, 2020, 03:10:12 pm »

It is a good question

I don't claim to be an expert on POWER

On the other hand, I got my first computer, TRS-80 Color Computer 3, when I was about 10 and started learning the Motorola 6809.  This was really fortunate, because they used the Motorola chipset in my undergraduate studies and I had a huge advantage.

I go wherever a project takes me, from soldering together ham radio equipment to working in quantitative finance.

Most of the free, open source projects I work on are for communications.  In this domain, the highest priority is interoperability, it is no use if a user on one platform can't communicate with a user on another platform.  Metcalfe's law tells us that the value of any communications system increases in proportion to the number of users squared.  This emphasizes how important it is for a network like SIP or XMPP to work across architectures.

Rather than designing software exclusively for POWER, my own goals typically involve designing or improving software so that it runs on any current or future platform.  This is an important goal.

Some of my recent activities include starting to investigate bugs in Blenderand generalizing that to GNU/Linux development

178

Blackbird / Re: [amdgpu] [Fiji] Fedora 32 Linux kernel 5.7.x crashes

« on: September 23, 2020, 12:12:18 pm »

Developers are always busy.  We have lists of bugs and feature requests from many places.  We don't usually work through them in chronological order: they are prioritized in different ways, based on the urgency of an issue, the effort required to fix an issue, etc.

That said, developers like quick wins and low hanging fruit.  If people do some testing and prove which permutations of kernel settings, firmware and hardware are troublesome and which permutations are good and also provide log data, the developer behind the code might recognize what the problem is and make a quick fix for it.

If the developer has to obtain hardware and do the tests himself, he might lose a day on it, in fact, he might never get around to it.

To give a personal example, I often spend a few weeks working on a feature or major change to some code and then before making the official release, I look over the bug list for anything that is easy and I fix those things and include them in the release.  If a bug report doesn't have enough detail, I have to defer it to the next release cycle because I can't delay a release for something that I can't reproduce.

I personally have no plan to buy the RX 5700 right now, I was going to skip that generation and go directly onto Big Navi.  If somebody else wants to test with one of my kernels using 4k page size, I'm happy to provide some guidance.

If anybody has contacts at AMD to get sample hardware for developers under NDA, there are a few people, myself included, who are happy to test it and provide feedback and sometimes fixes.

179

Blackbird / Re: [amdgpu] [Fiji] Fedora 32 Linux kernel 5.7.x crashes

« on: September 23, 2020, 04:19:49 am »

Regressions can be correlated with any specific feature or aspect of the platform, they don't always arise spontaneously.

The 64k page size is a significant difference for low-level code in device drivers like GPUs.

Developers of the kernel and drivers normally make a series of unit tests and manual tests before releasing new code.  If they don't do any tests on systems with a 64k page size, using the same combination of CPU and GPU, then it is possible that all their tests appear to succeed and they release code including a regression.

Therefore, I highly recommend that somebody tests different permutations.  I only have the RX 580 for now so I can't test this with my own kernels.  I only have one ppc64el system for now, I plan to use it for other development but when I get to the point where I have multiple machines here then I could dedicate one to regression testing things like this.

180

Blackbird / Re: [amdgpu] [Fiji] Fedora 32 Linux kernel 5.7.x crashes

« on: September 22, 2020, 06:32:27 pm »

Did anybody test the Navi cards with 4k kernel page size, as described in the other thread?

That fixed the issues for Nouveau