Messages

31

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: August 28, 2022, 12:02:46 pm »

Why not simply give it to a hackerspace as a gift?

If people see it at the hackerspace they will be more likely to buy one themselves

There is a hackerspace in Locarno, Switzerland, near the Swiss birds of prey park.  Don't leave small children unattended when the Condor is on the loose.

They don't currently have any black birds on their list

32

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: August 28, 2022, 01:14:57 am »

1. Debian Germany to use it to set up an additional build server and porterbox for Debian using PowerKVM for PowerPC big-endian Debian ports.

...

Any helpful opinions welcome!

The Debian Project Leader recently commented:

During my 2 terms we went from having around ~$750k in available funds to having about ~$1.25m now. Every time I mention what we've been spending on (like DSA upgrades, hardware for DDs, etc), we get more donations. As long as this is the case, I have no problem with DDs spending any money they want to if it helps them make Debian better. After all, this is literally the only reason why someone donates money to Debian in the first place. So, I don't believe that the Debian funds should be preserved like some kind of treasure. We should make it as easy as possible for people to give us money, and as easy as possible for DDs to spend money, all within our legal and social frameworks, of course.

Therefore, Debian can probably buy a few Blackbirds with funds from that bank account.  Debian paying for some Blackbirds (or bigger Talos II) is probably good business for retailers like Raptor and Vikings.

The Blackbird in question would still be available for somebody else who doesn't have $1 million (or €1 million)

I created a flavor of the Debian kernel package for a 4k page size (Gitlab commit) and nobody has integrated it in the Debian kernel repository.  This isn't a problem for me because I already know how to build a kernel but it would be helpful for other Debian users if they put the politics aside and merge that patch.  Due to the way Debian builds kernels it doesn't have any side effects for the 64k page size kernel packages.  Both types of kernel can coexist in the Debian archive and they can build different permutations of the installer for each of them.

I created a standalone topic for the idea of creating a dashboard or heat map to identify pinch points that can be addressed with donations of hardware or funds.

33

General OpenPOWER Discussion / creating dashboard or heatmap to identify pinch-points in other FOSS projects

« on: August 28, 2022, 01:05:27 am »

This was a comment in the discussion about donating a Blackbird to a worthy cause

It is probably not hard to create a dashboard to scrape or aggregate issues from bug trackers in various free software projects and assemble them into some kind of dashboard or heat map to identify the pinch-points for widespread OpenPOWER use.

Scraping the data is rather easy, most bug trackers have at least one well known API like RSS or iCalendar.

Identifying which issues relate to OpenPOWER depends on how diligent people are in tagging their bugs.

Deciding how to prioritize the issues on a dashboard or heat map may be more contentious as different people have different perspectives about which issues are important.

34

General OpenPOWER Discussion / workaround for using x86-only video-calling and WebRTC applications

« on: August 20, 2022, 04:02:20 am »

Consider the following setup:

main workstation:
- POWER9
- GPU
- OBS
- capture hardware

secondary workstation or laptop
- x86
- untrusted OS (e.g. Windows)
- applications that you are required to run for a client or employer (e.g. a messaging or remote desktop app) or a video meeting system that requires WebAssembly

You can generate an RTP video stream from the workstation, receive it on the secondary workstation and make it available as a virtual webcam for the software on that machine

I opened a couple of discussions about the topic:

http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-user/2022-August/055275.html

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/obs-streaming-udp-to-ffmpeg-to-v4l2-loopback.158367/

35

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: August 19, 2022, 12:08:30 pm »

Getting lists of issues from other projects is quite easy, I already did some work on that, creating scripts to scrape and merge issue lists from Github, Bugzilla, Redmine, etc

The more important and controversial thing is prioritization: for example, do the users simply vote for which issue is most important?  Do we focus on issues that help developers or issues that help end-users?  I won't use this post to give an answer to that.

Anyhow, if something like that comes together then I'm happy to provide feedback and maybe some code without any personal concern for who ends up getting this kit

The first link has screenshots

https://danielpocock.com/github-issues-as-an-icalendar-feed/

https://danielpocock.com/worlds-largest-kanban-board-with-free-software-communities/

https://github.com/dpocock/nagios-icalendar

36

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: August 19, 2022, 11:04:17 am »

Does anybody maintain some kind of dashboard of what is either urgent or important or both for this platform?

It could be a useful way to guide the allocation of the hardware.

37

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: Request for proposals: Who to donate my Blackbird and Power 9 CPU?

« on: August 09, 2022, 03:33:42 pm »

You could send it to me.  Some of the things I do with GPU testing are not possible on my primary workstation because I don't want to crash my desktop.

38

Talos II / Re: Indium pads required for 18-core CPU on Talos II Lite?

« on: July 29, 2022, 03:19:53 pm »

For a question like this, I would strongly recommend sending a formal support request to Raptor

If they supplied the CPU then they are responsible for any issues that arise if you fry your CPU during the warranty period

Please ask them to document stuff like this publicly, it will help the next person to avoid asking the same question

39

Applications and Porting / Re: FFMPEG

« on: July 23, 2022, 04:37:13 pm »

Maybe some of the other users can get together and crowdfund this bounty so the developer can feed his family.

We can impersonate IBM and pay $50 each in IBM's place

If we pay IBM's bills for them, will they accuse us of violating their trademark?

40

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: suspend, sleep, hibernate and resume?

« on: July 10, 2022, 05:06:23 pm »

Thanks for this feedback

Looking at the IBM doc, the STOP4 and subsequent states (STOP5, STOP11) have some similarities to S3 sleep.  They are not related to full hibernation/suspend.

For those states:

- are they supported in the Talos II / Blackbird firmware?

- are they supported in the Linux (or *BSD) kernels?

- do they require any special utilities in the userspace or desktop?

For a full hibernate / suspend to disk: that particular IBM doc doesn't really indicate whether hibernate is supported.

In the S3 sleep mode from the x86 world, similar to the POWER modes where some cores remain active, RAM continues to have power.

In the full hibernate, you can completely unplug the power supply.  All state from the CPU, RAM, hardware and GPU has been persisted on disk and all of those devices can recover their state when power comes back.

41

Applications and Porting / Re: FFMPEG

« on: July 10, 2022, 04:45:47 pm »

I had some communication with one of the developers who contributed a patch for one of these bounties

He said he did not receive payment

I feel very uncomfortable using ffmpeg if people have not been paid for their work

Personally, I found the unit tests did not pass, this implies that some more work may be necessary before the patch is merged.

https://fftrac-bg.ffmpeg.org/ticket/5570

On the other hand, if nobody looks at the patch from the developer or the feedback from other users then it is very unfair to the person who did the work.

42

Operating Systems and Porting / suspend, sleep, hibernate and resume?

« on: July 08, 2022, 08:24:44 am »

I saw a couple of threads with comments that the Raptor systems can't suspend or hibernate, this comment and this comment

I searched the wiki and it didn't have any pages about suspend, sleep, hibernate

Does anybody have more details about this?

In the event that hibernate is really impossible, are there any workarounds that people recommend for restoring desktop to a previous state after a complete shutdown?  For example, I've seen some utilities that can reopen windows on the same workspaces and in the same places but this doesn't solve everything.

43

Talos II / Re: Installing the system on a Samsung 980 Pro SSD 1TB

« on: June 25, 2022, 04:01:11 am »

I have the following setup

2x PM9A1 (the OEM version of the 980 Pro)

2× IB-PCI208-HS - Icy Box PCIe 4.0

Linux with btrfs RAID1

I use the Debian stable kernel rebuilt for the 4k page size as described in other discussions in this forum
5.10.0-8-powerpc64le-4k


I purchased the SSDs in October 2021

The system has currently been running 177 days without reboot

44

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: June 12, 2022, 06:47:45 am »

Raptor has made the motherboards to a high standard and most people seem to agree they will last a long time, hopefully long enough for RISC V to appear on our desktops too.

If you look at that comment, there is nothing in it to suggest an open RISC V will arrive imminently.  In fact, given that nobody is holding their breath for open RISC V, the comment could be seen as deliberately optimistic about Talos II boards running for years to come due to their quality.

we would advise against switching to blob-filled, proprietary platforms just to "hit back" at IBM.

There was nothing in the post to suggest people "hit back" at IBM

It is just a reality check, that is all.  We can see the way people started building Alma Linux and other continuations of CentOS.  That is not to "hit back" at Red Hat or IBM, they are building that because they need it and it was the right thing to do.

Given the communities are not so big, these situations do lead to people duplicating effort (e.g. Rocky Linux) and other inefficiencies that may have been avoidable.  Rather than having 3 or 4 forks of CentOS, developers doing exactly the same thing in parallel, it would be interesting if some of that developer effort went to POWER9 porting.

Speaking as a developer, I fully respect the right of any developer, whether it is a lone volunteer or a giant company like IBM to change their direction.  It then raises the question about how other people work around that.

For example, do you see the IBM POWER9 chips continuing to be available in sufficient quantities for the Raptor ecosystem?

Do you see any other manufacturer coming along with a 100% open chip to continue from POWER9?

The best way to keep things open in the short term, when also looking at long-term effects, would be to simply standardize the open software ecosystem on the POWER9 ISA vs. the POWER10 ISA.

Could you define that?  For example, which key software products need to commit to that statement?  In practice, how many of the developers on that part of the open source ecosystem are employed by IBM / Red Hat and could that take them down a POWER10 path?

...typing this from a Talos II workstation with Debian and Ungoogled Chromium installed

Does this mean the Chromium libs are now available for building other things?  If so, I might have another look at some projects that were pending for me to port.

45

General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: June 11, 2022, 04:49:41 pm »

I think some of this is out of Raptor's control

There is widespread discussion elsewhere about IBM wrecking things in Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora, POWER10 not being 100% open and Google has been wrecking things in Debian.  Coincidentally, IBM and Google are the two key players in OpenPOWER.  I don't want to gripe about it, only to express what it may mean for everybody who already bought in to this platform.

They had an OpenPOWER room at FOSDEM, they accepted my talk and then they canceled it, this is incredibly nasty stuff.  We go to FOSDEM every year as volunteers.  It was online this year, the Google people don't have to look the volunteers in the eye because it is all remote so they brought this dirty behavior into FOSDEM.

On a platform like POWER where there are not so many developers to begin with you can't do stuff like that.  If people see one volunteer being hurt then ten other volunteers will avoid the platform.  People don't care who is right or wrong, when they get the feeling of conflict, they decide to give it a pass or come back and look again in 12 months.  That makes it much harder for Raptor to sell to volunteer developers.

Debian has started spending a lot of money on a lawsuit recently.  I don't want to hijack this thread with details of the lawsuit, you can download the dossier if you really want to, the only thing I want to emphasize is that 17 developers resigned.  15 of those developers were removed from the keyring on 7 June.  Most of them will probably not make any statement about their resignation, most people don't like to take sides but there is a cause and effect: when conflict starts, some people quit.

This is all out of Raptor's control of course but it is a risk to the platform.

Personally, having contributed to patching packages for POWER9, I'm optimistic that lessons learnt from porting work on this platform will be easily transposed to ARM64 and RISC V.  Raptor has made the motherboards to a high standard and most people seem to agree they will last a long time, hopefully long enough for RISC V to appear on our desktops too.