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.
Show Posts
