Messages

1

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Intel Arc A770 - failed experiment

« on: February 26, 2026, 09:54:49 am »

Booted into a fresh install of Fedora 43 after patching, and it is not currently supported there via xe or i915 as far as I can tell. lspci enumerated it correctly and ID'd it as Intel DG2 [Arc A380], but there was no acceleration, no identification of its audio, and several libraries I'd expect Fedora to host for Intel GPUs aren't for ppc64le. So I'd guess even the xe driver has not yet reached mature status on ppc64le. Looks like my Radeon W6600 will continue to perform... not that I've pushed it terribly hard in that machine outside of running 30 year old open source games at 4K with antialiasing, or the odd bout of Quake II RTX.

2

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Intel Arc A770 - failed experiment

« on: February 12, 2026, 09:24:16 pm »

I am rolling my machine over to Fedora within the next couple of weeks. I’ll boot it with the Arc A380 I have kicking around and see if I can coax it into working.

3

Talos II / Re: Ubuntu 20.04 5.4.0-167: kexec load failed

« on: November 11, 2025, 12:23:42 pm »

When I dallied with Ubuntu 24.04 earlier this year I seem to recall having issues with the stock 6.8 kernel that manifested in not being able to use my Radeon W6600. It would simply hang and not respond to the kernel's attempts to initialize it. That isn't the same as not being able to boot at all, but maybe you should consider trying a different version altogether?

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GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Intel Arc A770 - failed experiment

« on: October 28, 2025, 01:38:42 pm »

Quick question/update: I've come into a dinky but adequate Arc A380 and am wondering what the odds are that I could use it in my Blackbird, freeing up the W6600 I've had in there for a different purpose. Anyone hear reports of the i915 or xe driver actually working on ppc64le before I free up an afternoon to try?

5

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Debian 13 Trixie is out!

« on: October 12, 2025, 08:12:41 pm »

I've had good luck with it so far. Would be nice to find a repo that would let me use the Firefox + JIT, but otherwise I don't have any complaints yet.

6

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Is there any tool to detect the logic that might be impacted by endianess?

« on: September 24, 2025, 08:19:40 pm »

Doom 3 as released circa 2004 is endian-neutral and has Altivec/VMX optimizations, yes. But Doom 3 BFG Edition - a later remastering of the game with an updated OpenGL implementation and engine - is a different animal outright. tle's probably right about there being problems.

7

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Debian 13 Trixie is out!

« on: August 26, 2025, 07:42:26 pm »

I’ve been running it on my Blackbird with a Radeon W6600 for the past week and it’s been great. This is the happiest I’ve been with a distribution since Void Linux ppc64le.

8

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Debian 13 Trixie is out!

« on: August 21, 2025, 01:25:35 pm »

I'm still waiting a bit before updating, what kind of problems are you talking about?

Sounds like issues of a mismatch between Debian's new default 4KB kernel page size and VMs with 64KB page sizes. You can install a kernel package enabling 64KB page size handling, or there are published workarounds if you're sticking to 4KB page sizes.

9

Operating Systems and Porting / Ubuntu 24.04

« on: June 16, 2025, 07:39:02 am »

Ahoy! Finally had time to sit down and move off of Fedora, and the experience was mostly painless. Ubuntu Server installed without much fuss, but after installing Xorg and Xfce’s dependencies and rebooting the kernel barfed a bunch of error messages about failing to initialize my Radeon W6600. This was remedied by pulling down a newer kernel - some branch of 6.11 IIRC - and then manually pointing X11 to the Radeon instead of the AST2500. Once that was done I found the default web browser crashes at startup with a pointedly unspecific I/O error, so I grabbed a second machine to look up the Firefox PPA, where the latest ESR could be added. This appears to be built without ClassicHasClass’s baseline JIT; if somebody out there has a repo I can use to that end I’d be grateful. There’s still some tire kicking to do - I haven’t installed OpenCL yet and may need to manually compile Deadbeef, but overall I’m pleased.

10

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42

« on: May 11, 2025, 09:24:35 am »

It seems like a lot of my problems have been coming from Mesa-freeworld this time around. Replacing with Fedora’s stock Mesa seems to have alleviated my most immediate problems; still have yet to see Xfce via X11 work so far.

11

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42

« on: May 06, 2025, 05:00:15 pm »

Yeah, looks like X11 is pretty dead for KDE and GNOME. Neither of them will start. Other X11 wms will work fine.

I ran into an issue where Xfce only wants to start in X11 mode on the AST2500, which I’m 99% I can work around by creating /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/21-gpu-driver.conf and populating it anew. In Wayland it appears to be pretty rudimentary, but hopefully it’ll work in the future.

12

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42

« on: April 25, 2025, 09:23:14 pm »

All right. Clean install of Fedora 42, reusing the /home folder from my prior Fedora install. It’s all Wayland now, and I’ll revisit Xfce at some future point on this machine. I am using mesa-freeworld for accelerated video encoding and playback. Vulkan works within Gnome but KDE reliably chooses llvmpipe over the radeonsi Vulkan driver, as below.

hasturtium@garlic:~$ MESA_VK_DEVICE_SELECT=list vulkaninfo
selectable devices:
  GPU 0: 1002:73e3 "AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (RADV NAVI23)" discrete GPU 0000:03:00.0
  GPU 1: 10005:0 "llvmpipe (LLVM 20.1.1, 128 bits)" CPU 0000:00:00.0

How do I beat it upside the head to understand my point of view?

13

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 41 is out!

« on: April 23, 2025, 01:34:19 pm »

Point the symlink /etc/systemd/system/default.target to /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target and reboot, and it should come up with a text console login. Log in, do a startx (assuming your .xinitrc is configured) and away you go.

You are very nice. Thank you!

14

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 41 is out!

« on: April 22, 2025, 08:45:51 am »

I realize this sounds like a non-solution, but the solution for me is to textboot and bring up X11 (or, if I'm feeling masochistic, Wayland) manually -- no display manager at all.

Honestly, that sounds fine. In days of yore (read: Slackware on x86) I'd just change the runlevel at boot; what's the approved methodology in systemd-land?

15

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 41 is out!

« on: April 21, 2025, 11:30:31 am »

Now I’ve been bitten by the gdm Xorg snafu in F41. Managed to squirm into Gnome Classic, switched the display manager to lightdm, rebooted, and the system now only lets me into the onboard video via Gnome Classic and Wayland. What’s the solution here? I’m about this close to just switching to RHEL 10 when it lands.