Messages

241

Applications and Porting / Re: (some times) no audio on Firefox

« on: July 23, 2020, 01:06:15 pm »

The problem you describe is not an issue with the OpenPOWER platform or RCS in particular, it is the same with Zoom on x86.

You can find specific details here although this bug report is about another topic:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1622628#c5

It would be interesting to know if the problem goes away with the latest version of Firefox

This also appears to be part of Zoom's business strategy, trying to coerce people to use their app or download their binary plugin.

242

General OpenPOWER Discussion / RCS products for confidential human subject research data

« on: July 22, 2020, 01:06:24 pm »

Many academic institutions around the world have special requirements for the storage of confidential human subject research data.

For example, a private company like Facebook can profile their users and there is little control on that.  But when a team in a university conducts a study on the same human subjects, they have to go to their Institutional Review Board (IRB) for approval.

Each time they start a new study, they have to approach the IRB and submit a plan.  The IRB can ask about their data storage and processing strategy.

This appears to be a use case where legislation introduced decades before modern spyware forces them to look for best practice.  With each new generation of technologies like Intel ME, the OpenPOWER and similar platforms become more compelling for this type of user.

Has anybody already tried to pitch these solutions in that environment?

243

General OpenPOWER Discussion / hosting requirements and strategies

« on: July 21, 2020, 11:38:18 am »

Can anybody comment on ideas or case studies for hosting with the Talos II platform?

For example:

What type of workloads is it most suitable for, or how would you build a Talos II-based rack mount system for different types of workloads?

Many hosting companies sell space by full rack, half rack, quarter rack (approximately) - how would you fit out one of these spaces if you had a pure Talos II strategy, even using the platform for firewall and BGP perhaps?

The largest vendors can provide next day and sometimes same day replacement parts, worldwide.  How would you approximate this with RCS products?  One idea that comes to mind: keeping one or two "community" servers in each rack for developers to log in and run tests, running Jenkins (a.k.a. travis-ci for POWER9) on the understanding that these servers can be scavanged on short notice to resolve production outages.

Is there any interest in hosting here in Switzerland right now?

244

General OpenPOWER Discussion / helping people purchase and get started

« on: July 21, 2020, 10:26:05 am »

I wanted to make this world a little bit easier for other developers to buy in, so I'm making some contributions on the wiki, feedback or enhancements would also be welcome.

In particular, comparing different wiki pages during purchasing can be frustrating, so I've combined key facts in a single table on a single page but please feel free to correct it if you feel anything is not quite right there.

245

Blackbird / using bigger CPUs with some cores disabled on Blackbird?

« on: July 20, 2020, 06:50:51 am »

I started a separate thread about disabling cores in the CPUs in a Talos II

It occurred to me that disabling cores could be a way to reduce CPU power consumption on Blackbird, for example, if you have an 18 core CPU (which is not supported) and you use the operating system to disable 4 cores, leaving just 14 cores, does the power consumption fall within the supported range for the motherboard?

This is probably not a good way to design a new system but if somebody has a spare CPU and they want to temporarily use it in a Blackbird, maybe this would be a useful hack that will reduce the risk of unexpected behavior.

246

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: forum sections for different regions?

« on: July 18, 2020, 10:09:26 am »

There are different marketing possibilities around Europe.  Each country is different.

For example, in Switzerland, people have high salaries and would not feel stressed about the price of these products.  If somebody does a few Blackbird demos at small events and hackerspaces, a few more users will probably come on board quite quickly.

Somewhere like Ireland is very different: in Ireland, the country is cold, even in summer.  Some buyers in hot countries may hesitate to buy a powerful workstation because it will heat up their home but in Ireland, people would see that as a benefit and it will not lead to hesitation at the time of purchase.

247

General OpenPOWER Discussion / forum sections for different regions?

« on: July 13, 2020, 01:05:59 pm »

Are there enough users here to have sections in the forum for specific regions and/or countries?

For example, advertising local events where OpenPOWER solutions will be on display or simply helping users find each other at local hackerspaces.

248

Applications and Porting / Re: availability for porting work

« on: July 08, 2020, 02:24:33 pm »

It is an interesting suggestion.  The JIT is only for performance or it is also necessary for some functionality that is currently unavailable in Firefox on POWER9?

Somebody else recently commented about Firefox using too much CPU, I suggested experimenting with cgroups to constrain the Firefox process as a workaround until it is fully optimized.  Here is a script I developed for that purpose, there are other permutations available elsewhere:
https://gitlab.com/dpocock/firefox-cgroups

I actually developed that for making it more sane on my x86 laptop, it is not just for POWER9

249

Applications and Porting / availability for porting work

« on: July 07, 2020, 08:59:09 am »

If there are any urgent porting issues that I could investigate and if anybody is willing to sponsor a few weeks of ad-hoc developer time like that then please get in touch with me.

I'm beginning to try and schedule work on a range of things for the period October - December 2020.

If funding (or other incentives) are available, I'd like to use some of that time to become more familiar with this platform as I believe it has an important role to play in the free software ecosystem.

If anybody can suggest high-priority issues in the hope that somebody else will fund the work please feel free to comment here too.

250

Talos II / Using the μPCIe connector (J10108)

« on: June 17, 2020, 06:04:47 am »

The manual:
https://wiki.raptorcs.com/w/images/e/e3/T2P9D01_users_guide_version_1_0.pdf

mentions a μPCIe connector (J10108)

How many lanes does it support?

Can anybody give any example of products that can be connected with this?  For example, can it be used with an M.2 or U.2 adapter for SSDs?

251

Talos II / Re: OCuLink ambiguity

« on: June 17, 2020, 06:02:02 am »

From the Thunderbolt 3 thread...

The only thing I can say is that a working OCuLink adapter is listed in the RCSwiki.

but it is odd that the ordering page includes an option to select an OCuLink PCIe Expander but the form doesn't include any of the OCuLink adapters.  When I noticed that, it left me wondering if there is OCuLink support on the motherboard.  It would be no use for somebody to order the expander and motherboard without also ordering one of the OCuLink adapter cards.

252

General Discussion / Re: using Thunderbolt 3 card to connect multiple NVMe SSDs, 10GbE NICs, 4k displays

« on: June 16, 2020, 12:38:03 pm »

Maybe OCuLink is the alternative to Thunderbolt 3 - but there is some ambiguity about OCuLink support on the Talos II and Blackbird, can anybody clarify it?

253

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Radeon Pro vs regular Radeon cards - worth the price premium for POWER users?

« on: June 16, 2020, 11:10:54 am »

I created a separate thread with some observations about NVIDIA, maybe it would be better to discuss specifics of their drivers there.

254

GPU Compute / Accelerators / nVidia official proprietary and open source code for POWER

« on: June 16, 2020, 11:09:25 am »

These are some of the links that appear most relevant:

NVIDIA forum, describes support for P100 on POWER8 and V100 on POWER9.

NVIDIA media release about collaboration with IBM on open source machine learning with Tesla V100

IBM pages about the same topic

The V100 products are rather expensive.

Nonetheless, some people have suggested that bits of the proprietary driver can be used to run other NVIDIA GPUs in a POWER system.  This thread might be a useful place to collect comments on topics like that.

255

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Radeon Pro vs regular Radeon cards - worth the price premium for POWER users?

« on: June 16, 2020, 07:54:20 am »

This generation of cards doesn't have full hardware ray tracing support, I don't know if that is also a factor in that particular issue.

Many of the reviews of the RX 5700 and W5700 mention that the current NVIDIA cards may be better for people who need ray tracing.  But the NVIDIA drivers are less open than the AMD driver and may not work on POWER.

The previews of the next generation AMD Radeon "big navi" cards suggest they plan to add full ray tracing support and close the gap with NVIDIA but we may not see any cards like that until the end of the year.  That may eliminate the type of issue described in CT magazine.

For me, that means I'm tempted to use cheaper cards, such as the RX 5500 with 4GB or even something older from ebay as a temporary solution for six months.  I don't specifically need ray tracing but would like to have the overall combination of features, for example, AV1 support and lower power consumption.