Messages

241

General CPU Discussion / Re: v2 CPU availability?

« on: July 31, 2020, 10:15:10 am »

I had the impression your comment may be a bit sarcastic but there are cases where 22 core CPUs are useful in a workstation

For example, a multi-seat configuration where 2 or 3 users have keyboards and monitors connected to the same workstation, somebody who is compiling a lot of C++ or Java, somebody who does a lot of data analysis.  For some people, it may be all of the above.  The Talos II dual CPU is really good value for money in such cases.

242

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: July 31, 2020, 08:07:30 am »

Personally, I can empathize with all those small businesses operating in the free and open source technology space who may also be impacted by things out of their control, whether it is a loss of sales, loss of colleagues, loss of family or all of the above.  On the other hand, I don't want to speculate about Raptor or any other specific business.

If any small business is looking for community support at this time, I hope they will be able to reach out to the right supporters in the community and find a constructive way forward.

Looking at Raptor in particular: I had deferred buying new workstations for a number of years.  But with the increase in working from home, it became important for me to get a new workstation in 2020 and Raptor was high on my list.  Not everybody is fortunate enough to be purchasing a workstation this year but if you know people who need to maximize their productivity while working from home, suggesting they consider Raptor's products may be helpful.  That is why I tried to capture some of my own purchasing experience here.

243

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: helping people purchase and get started

« on: July 30, 2020, 02:27:17 pm »

Continent is not always helpful for tax/customs purposes and also due to language differences.

For example,

- Switzerland is not in the EU VAT and customs system

- consumers from Italy and France (where taxes are over 20%) drive into Switzerland to buy things like memory sticks, SSDs, CPUs, laptops, digital cameras and SD cards at 8% tax.  They are supposed to declare these products at the border and pay the extra 12% when returning to their own country but I suspect they sometimes forget.

- businesses in Italy, France or any other EU country don't need to pay the VAT taxes, so they buy from their local suppliers to get faster delivery and local support

- the UK doesn't use the Euro, they use Sterling and as they are a very big economy, their local suppliers are very efficient for people who live in the UK.  After Brexit, they may have customs barriers, nobody knows right now. I used to live in the UK and if I lived there now, I would probably want to order from a local UK supplier, pay in GBP and receive the product next day

So it is probably useful to have some groupings, e.g. a single page for all EU countries as well as some local pages for big countries like UK and France.  Please also remember language is a factor in EU countries, if people in Italy and France can buy the same product at the same price from a supplier using their own language, they will usually prefer that.

The Swiss page can be seen as a proof-of-concept, any ideas or initiatives to extrapolate from that are welcome.

244

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: helping people purchase and get started

« on: July 30, 2020, 09:49:53 am »

My next step in this area is creating localized ordering pages

I created one here for Switzerland because I know a few people nearby who are curious about ordering

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/LocalSuppliers/Switzerland

The concept is simple: people can click through to some local supplier to build up a shopping cart of local parts.  Most people in Switzerland live near a Digitec store, so I created Digitec links as an example.

This concept could be adapted for other countries.  For example, people could maintain pages like this in the wiki and share them with local colleagues and friends.

To automate, it could be driven from a Git repository, for example, using Jekyll or Jinja2 templates.  The inputs would be
a) table of suggested parts (e.g. the Define 7 XL case, long name, EAN, anything to help search for it)
b) table of local suppliers, by state/country, including company name and a URL template string for putting the part into a search

With an automated solution, somebody could change a part name (e.g. adding the Define 8 XL case whenever it exists) and it would propagate to every country page.

This is not an attempt to create a new shopping cart, it is simply a complement for existing shopping carts, to help people save time and increase the chances that people end up with similar supported components.

245

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

« on: July 30, 2020, 06:59:30 am »

Thanks for this feedback

obs-studio is one of the things I want to run myself, so I would probably look at that first

Debian buildd says it already compiles on ppc64el on both sid and buster:

https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=obs-studio&suite=unstable
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=obs-studio&suite=buster

Does it run or are there bugs on ppc64el?  Are those bugs in the Debian BTS?  If so, it would be really helpful to tag them as described in the opening post on this topic.

I'm planning to get one of the next generation of AMD Radeon cards, described in this other thread, one of the reasons for that is I would like to try their VCN hardware encoding for video streaming.  Unfortunately, according to that article, the AV1 support may not appear in these cards and may only arrive in 2021.  Various news articles have appeared suggesting AMD will release the Navi 2 cards between September and December.

246

General CPU Discussion / v2 CPU availability?

« on: July 29, 2020, 11:25:49 am »

I notice that Raptor is only offering the 4 core and 8 core version of the v2 (stepping DD2.3) chips.  The 22 core chip is only available in v1.

Is there any reason for this?

I decided to order the 8 core v2 CPUs with the intention that I will use them on a dual-CPU board until the 22 core v2.3 CPU is available.  Then I could move the 8 core CPUs onto Talos II Lite boards and upgrade to 22 core v2.3 chips on my primary workstation.

247

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Debian 10 vs CentOS 7 (both as VM under Fedora 32 KVM)

« on: July 29, 2020, 12:36:28 am »

Are you able to access the Debian VM through a text console, for example, by starting at a different run level or using the CTRL-ALT-F3 keystroke in the VM?

If that doesn't work, I would suggest asking for help through the Debian IRC channels, somebody can help you with that step-by-step

https://wiki.debian.org/IRC

248

General Discussion / optimum add-on cards for 2-slot systems (Talos II Lite and Blackbird)

« on: July 26, 2020, 01:11:54 pm »

I've had some discussions with other developers about the POWER9 platform and one observation I've made is that people are looking at a choice between Talos II Lite or Blackbird.  Many don't need a dual CPU system and can't afford the full Talos II.

To iron out bugs in software, it is really vital to have a critical mass of developers using the platform and I suspect most of them are going to use either Talos II Lite or Blackbird.  When they narrow their choice down to those products, the next thing that comes to mind is: what should they put in the PCIe slots to get best use out of their workstation?

The wiki contains a large list of compatible products but what I'm really thinking about here is making a shortlist of five to ten really interesting products and putting them on the comparison page

Here is a summary of the problem:
 

• most people will want to put a GPU in the x16 slot - some GPUs, like the Radeon Pro W5700 throw in a USB-C socket or some other bonus which is really useful on a system like this with limited expansion slots
• with the x8 slot, most people will probably want a card that can give them some combination of SSDs (U.2 NVMe), legacy SATA disks and hopefully some other ports like OCuLink or ethernet on the same board as a bonus.  Can anybody comment on which boards are optimal in this scenario?

Some other permutations come to mind: for example, people who don't do a lot of graphics may be happy with a GPU in the x8 slot and use the x16 slot for OCuLink.  Hopefully we will also see some external OCuLink GPUs in the future but none seem to be available right now.

Feel free to add comments here or at the bottom of this wiki page

249

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Debian 10 vs CentOS 7 (both as VM under Fedora 32 KVM)

« on: July 25, 2020, 03:02:39 pm »

That tells me that Debian is using Wayland.  You can disable Wayland in Debian so that it uses Xorg, like the Centos host.  There are lots of pages with information about how to do that

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=debian+disable+wayland

Please give feedback if this solves the problem for you, it is most likely a Wayland problem and not a PPC problem.

250

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Debian 10 vs CentOS 7 (both as VM under Fedora 32 KVM)

« on: July 24, 2020, 11:31:39 am »

Even as a desktop user, there is always a display server in your system

It is really useful to find out, for example, if it is X or Wayland:

You can run this command in Fedora and each VM:

$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

You can get more information in each system by looking at the output of

$ xdpyinfo

In the Debian system, you can look at this file and search for errors:

/var/log/Xorg.0.log

Any line with WW is a warning and EE is an error

Here is an example error from that file:

[    98.019] (EE) Failed to load module "glx" (loader failed, 0)

The more details you share from that file, the easier it is to help you.

I suspect the problem you have is not a problem with the ppc64el architecture, it could be something related to X or Wayland and you might want to ask in the Debian IRC channels to see if anybody can help troubleshoot.

251

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Debian 10 vs CentOS 7 (both as VM under Fedora 32 KVM)

« on: July 24, 2020, 10:56:01 am »

If you connect to the Debian VM with SSH, how is the performance of the command line?

Can you try to use X forwarding over SSH to see how one of the apps in the Debian VM behaves when its window is on the Fedora host X display?

Have you checked journalctl and the X server log in the Debian VM?

Which X server process in each case (Fedora host, CentOS and Debian)?

When you write "slower", do you mean the GUI is slow but applications are running at expected speed?  Or the applications actually run slowly when you do something with no visual output, e.g. zipping a large file is the same speed in every VM and host?

252

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.

253

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?

254

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?

255

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.