Messages

106

Applications and Porting / Re: Chromium and Ungoogled Chromium DNF Repository

« on: April 27, 2023, 09:56:58 am »

I am building the RPM version for RHEL/Fedora.

Hey, any updates on this? Are these available anywhere? The parent post provides a repo, but try as I might I can't actually download or install anything from it.

107

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Ultimate Doom with all enhancements on crispy-doom client

« on: April 16, 2023, 12:31:19 pm »

these are some other ports I’ve had luck with:

- Woof is an effort to modernize and bring the venerable old MBF (Marine’s Best Friend, by Lee Killough) forward to the present day. It supports a number of compatibility levels, from vanilla Doom through various post-Boom incarnations, and it’s software-only so it will play nice with the AST onboard video. Mouse support isn’t the most responsive but it’s a good port.

- DSDA-Doom is a fork of PRBOOM+ meant for speedrunners, but it’s enjoyably flexible. OPL2 emulation isn’t great but Fluidsynth sounds nice, it supports software and OpenGL rendering at arbitrary resolutions, and screams along at 4K on an RX 6600. This is my go-to right now.

- GZDoom is the gold standard at large, but I’ve run into numerous scenarios where performance is underwhelming. Some big adventurous WADs like the tail end of Eviternity absolutely tank in the hardware renderer; whether OpenGL or Vulkan is used, performance dips down below 20 fps and shows low core usage. Software rendering fares a bit better but the lack of SIMD optimizations hurts. A while back I thought about using ClassicHasClass’s advice to insert intrinsic translation through gcc’s headers, but the port has a complicated CMake config (probably because it pulls in a half-dozen other libraries to enable all its functionality), and I never figured out where to insert a directive to the compiler to try it out.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten with kicking Doom source port tires on Power9 so far. Suggestions are welcome.

108

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: AMD OpenCL / ROCm

« on: March 26, 2023, 09:39:38 am »

Still no progress on my own attempt, unfortunately. AMD are releasing new versions faster than I can merge the little work I have already done.

I found this other page detailing another person's attempts to build ROCm on POWER9, which might be worth looking at.

 https://systems.nic.uoregon.edu/internal-wiki/index.php?title=Rocm_on_power9

ROCm is an organizational clusterfuck. Around two years ago I determined the best way to handle it on Ubuntu x86_64 was to sync to their repo, then when a new version was pushed, ppa-purge the repo, remove all folders and files ROCm left behind, then add the repo again and install from scratch. To my knowledge it hasn’t gotten better since, and that’s not even touching on other platforms. I respect the work you have put in, but I am not sure things will improve for AMD beyond this “beat to fit, paint to match” approach to software design.

God, I hope Intel sticks with Arc and gets OneAPI and their compute stack running everywhere. That’d save a lot of headaches.

109

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 37 has arrived!

« on: March 10, 2023, 07:28:56 pm »

My Fedora install has developed a wrinkle in the past couple of days. On running sudo dnf update, I receive the following message:

Code: [Select]

Last metadata expiration check: 1:23:53 ago on Fri 10 Mar 2023 06:02:42 PM CST.
Dependencies resolved.

 Problem: The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: systemd, systemd-udev
====================================================================================================
 Package                         Architecture      Version                  Repository         Size
====================================================================================================
Skipping packages with conflicts:
(add '--best --allowerasing' to command line to force their upgrade):
 systemd                         ppc64le           251.7-611.fc37           fedora            4.3 M
 systemd                         ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           4.3 M
 systemd-libs                    ppc64le           251.7-611.fc37           fedora            652 k
 systemd-libs                    ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           652 k
 systemd-pam                     ppc64le           251.7-611.fc37           fedora            355 k
 systemd-pam                     ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           354 k
 systemd-rpm-macros              noarch            251.7-611.fc37           fedora             30 k
 systemd-rpm-macros              noarch            251.13-5.fc37            updates            29 k
Skipping packages with broken dependencies:
 systemd-container               ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           556 k
 systemd-devel                   ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           578 k
 systemd-networkd                ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           614 k
 systemd-oomd-defaults           noarch            251.13-5.fc37            updates            25 k
 systemd-resolved                ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           284 k
 systemd-udev                    ppc64le           251.13-5.fc37            updates           1.9 M
 systemd-udev                    ppc64le           251.7-611.fc37           fedora            1.9 M

Transaction Summary
====================================================================================================
Skip  15 Packages

Packages unrelated to these install fine, but these are invariant and inflexible in failing to install. It appears that somehow I've entered dependency hell, as attempting to run sudo dnf update -- results in this:

Code: [Select]

Error:
 Problem: The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: gnome-shell, grub2-ppc64le, systemd-udev

It suggests using --skip-broken to skip uninstallable packages, but that makes no difference. I don't think I did anything novel, so maybe something scabby got pushed in a package that's throwing things off. Any suggestions? I can probably limp this along as-is until the April-ish release of Fedora 38...

Edit: manually installing systemd-251.7 went without a hitch. The changelog for 251.13-5 indicates some dependencies were changed to prevent an edge case, but I’m guessing it’s causing other issues as well. So it’s likely that I can just wait a few days and this problem will go away by itself.

110

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 19, 2023, 09:10:38 pm »

Only two weeks? Wow!
And everything working now?

Yes, I'm honestly a little shocked. They were great about communicating with me, and I've been pleased as punch that a replacement came in, I moved everything to a newer case with better cable management, and it all just... came right back up.

111

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 19, 2023, 02:01:04 am »

And we're back. Hello!

112

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

« on: February 09, 2023, 03:33:22 pm »

Out of morbid curiosity, has there been any movement for Intel GPUs on ppc64le since the last update?

edit: Checking the PCIe compatibility list on the Wiki, it looks like it fails to compile. Guess we'll wait for the Xe driver before we try again...

113

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 07, 2023, 06:01:39 pm »

Thanks again. I sent my motherboard off today - now I wait for the RMA.

114

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 05, 2023, 10:36:21 am »

You also could give me your ticket number. I could post it on Twitter.

Thank you - I deleted my account there recently. My ticket number is #493290.

115

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: February 04, 2023, 08:45:58 pm »

That definitely qualifies. Haven't gotten an update on the support ticket I placed a week ago, so I believe I'll give them a call on Monday.

116

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: January 30, 2023, 11:55:16 am »

I agree this sounds hardware-related. Haven't seen anything like that on my own Blackbird, though it did have to get RMAed because the BMC video went bananas.

Define "bananas." Mine would very occasionally have some kind of issue where the BMC would either fail to output video, or would output garbled video that was illegible. The only solution to those was to turn the machine off, turn the power supply off, wait a few seconds, then allow the BMC to fully reinitialize. That would fix it.

117

Blackbird / Re: SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: January 29, 2023, 06:39:12 pm »

Update: problem appears to have spread, no matter which SATA ports I use X11 doesn’t successfully initialize the Radeon any more. Putting in an RMA request with Raptor - we’ll see what they say.

118

Blackbird / SATA ports on the fritz?

« on: January 28, 2023, 04:54:41 pm »

I purchased a PCIe to NVMe adapter, cloned the contents of my SATA SSD to the new drive on a different machine, installed the NVMe drive with my existing Fedora 37 install... and the new drive wouldn't boot past initializing the Radeon in my Blackbird. So, resigned to the incompatibility, I removed the NVMe drive, set up the SATA SSD again, and booted, only to see a new error appear in my Petitboot loader, kAFS not found, with an error code of -97. Booting afterward proceeds normally, up until the Radeon is initialized for the login screen, at which point the display signal gets flaky and visible artifacting occurs intermittently. Shutting the system down afterward proceeds more or less normally, as far as I can tell.

The issue appears to be limited to SATA0 and SATA1 - I can boot the machine normally from SATA2 or SATA3. I am genuinely flummoxed here - does anyone have any insight?

119

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake II RTX!

« on: January 23, 2023, 07:39:40 pm »

Ah, thanks for that. I've been toying with getting a new GPU, and maybe this is what pushes me over the edge. Do you have the firmware loaded for Petitboot?

I do not - never got an answer for which subset of Radeon firmware should be loaded, so I have the BMC’s video going to HDMI2, then toggle over to DisplayPort for the Radeon.

No multiplayer yet - my twitch skills are mostly intact, but I’d have to find servers!

120

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake II RTX!

« on: January 23, 2023, 10:46:26 am »

have you tried playing it with SMT disabled? i'm curious if theres a performance difference.

I wouldn’t expect much - Quake II’s CPU demands are trivial. I genuinely think the Ogg Vorbis support for music playback would dwarf the demands of the game itself. Running Q2RTX with the OpenGL renderer reliably nets between 920-1000 fps on my config at 4K!

The overwhelming share of the computational grunt needed will be demanded of the GPU itself. I expect any weird stuttering to be down to things like vsync being enabled by some part of the display stack despite what Q2RTX expects, or similar issues. Out of curiosity how do you configure or disable SMT? I’ve been meaning to try it in order to determine its impact on some other titles, chief among them GZDoom…