Messages

121

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?

122

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!

123

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…

124

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

« on: January 22, 2023, 03:12:14 pm »

The game was complaining about "Could not load library gamex86.so" so what I did is I copy my `gameppc64le.so` to `gamex86.so`. Not the best way but I could not find much details how the game workout the library filename.

Ack! I forgot to mention that step. I could’ve sworn mine compiled to gamex86_64.so, but I copied the file to gamex86.so and then it didn’t give me any hassle.

@tle, also being a Fedoran, which card and which kernel (I'm currently on 6.1.6)?

I’m running on 6.1.6 with an XFX Radeon RX 6600, though it also worked with kernel 6.1.5. Both have worked with Fedora’s current Mesa release. Reported framerate didn’t necessarily correlate to onscreen framerate, though it did become more consistent when vsync was enabled. It’ll be interesting to see how this improves as time goes on.

125

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

« on: January 21, 2023, 03:45:46 pm »

should I wait for the intel arc gpu drivers over AMD? i've wanted to play this since it came out and I'd rather wait for power9 support to play it. I might opt for an a770 gpu over an AMD card if it plays well. Maybe a bit off topic but should one even trust an intel gpu moreso over an amd/nvidia lol..?

In x86_64 land Intel’s the gold standard for open video drivers - hassle-free, exposed features that work without too much fuss, and as well-behaved as the hardware’s capabilities allow. They’re at an inflection point now that xe is being forked from i915 to provide dedicated support for 12th Gen and Arc hardware, but they have a funded and capable driver team and it’ll probably come up pretty fast. I can’t tell you where to spend your money, but once Arc has become a going concern on ppc64le I’m planning to swap the RX 6600 into my Windows machine so the Arc can be in my Blackbird. The video encoding is stupid good - if I can get OBS working, that’ll make everything from Blu-Ray transcoding to desktop capture overwhelmingly nicer on the platform for me.

126

General Hardware Discussion / Re: Could Intel DG2 the missing piece of the puzzle for ppc64le workstation?

« on: January 18, 2023, 07:26:19 pm »

Per Phoronix, it looks like Intel's preparing to merge new DRM code for its xe driver fork from the i915 driver. This driver's being brought up on both x86_64 and aarch64 to ensure broad platform compatibility. It may be a while before the driver's well-tuned, but it sounds like they've been smart to promote its 12th gen video and Arc cards to a new driver infrastructure... and I'm very much looking forward to playing with Intel's great H.264/H.265/AV1 encoder on Power.

127

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

« on: January 18, 2023, 07:15:02 pm »

So. Screenshots.





Not much to start, but I can provide more soon. Performance is kinda variable and slower than it is in Windows, but it's still entirely doable. As said before I'd expect Arc support via the xe driver to be much faster whenever that lands. Early days - I'd expect subsequent Mesa revisions to continue improving speed for RDNA2 on Power.

128

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

« on: January 16, 2023, 09:31:11 am »

I can't believe I'm typing this, but - with some caveats - Quake II RTX compiles and runs under Fedora 37 with an RDNA2 Radeon on Power9. The gotchas:

* If you're copying your Windows folder over and you care about preserving your saved games, make sure the contents of Q2RTX/baseq2/save are moved to ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/save. If you don't, and you leave the Windows save folder intact, the executable will throw an error when trying to load a new game or save because it can't rectify the presence of the Windows folder with the presence of the Linux folder.
* For some reason I can't get timedemo functionality to work - attempting to load a timedemo from the console results in "Couldn't load maps/demo1.dm2.bsp: No such file or directory".
EDIT: * The game may bomb out at startup complaining that it can't find a Vulkan-capable GPU (despite the logs indicating it successfully queried both your Vulkan GPU as well as llvmpipe). In that case, manually edit ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/q2config.cfg and change the line seta ray_tracing_api value from "auto" to "query". I tried setting this to “pipeline” on a lark to test the other raytracing method it supports, and that crashes the executable because it apparently can’t find the extensions it’s looking for.

Nevertheless it runs at around 60 fps at 1080p on an RX 6600 with resolution scaling set to 65%, which doesn't trail the Windows version with the same card too much at all. There is some minor visual corruption at the periphery of the screen, but with some more testing and bugfixes that can probably be fixed. Back to Stroggos I go...

That's interesting that you could get it loaded. It does not really work for me. 1stly I need to enable the raytracing flag for mesa. 2ndly the game came back with error "This GPU is not supported"

It came up pretty easily with my RX 6600 with the 6.1.5 kernel that was pushed out over the weekend. Biggest thing to do is to manually edit that line in the config file in the original post to specify "query" versus "auto" - I think something in Quake II’s feature polling mechanism breaks when it can't find the "pipeline" method it's looking for exposed in the driver. Give it a try and let me know what you think... It'll be a lot more interesting to see this on Intel's xe driver for Arc cards in a few months' time, given that their early fork of the old i915 driver already comes up on arm64. Intel’s raytracing speed is much more competitive with Nvidia’s - having tried an A750 and the RX 6600 in Windows, it isn’t a stretch to say Intel’s card manages at least as well at 1440p as the Radeon does at 1080p.

ClassicHasClass, I'll be happy to in a bit.

129

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] Quake II RTX!

« on: January 15, 2023, 12:16:10 am »

I can't believe I'm typing this, but - with some caveats - Quake II RTX compiles and runs under Fedora 37 with an RDNA2 Radeon on Power9. The gotchas:

* If you're copying your Windows folder over and you care about preserving your saved games, make sure the contents of Q2RTX/baseq2/save are moved to ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/save. If you don't, and you leave the Windows save folder intact, the executable will throw an error when trying to load a new game or save because it can't rectify the presence of the Windows folder with the presence of the Linux folder.
* For some reason I can't get timedemo functionality to work - attempting to load a timedemo from the console results in "Couldn't load maps/demo1.dm2.bsp: No such file or directory".
EDIT: * The game may bomb out at startup complaining that it can't find a Vulkan-capable GPU (despite the logs indicating it successfully queried both your Vulkan GPU as well as llvmpipe). In that case, manually edit ~/.quake2rtx/baseq2/q2config.cfg and change the line seta ray_tracing_api value from "auto" to "query". I tried setting this to “pipeline” on a lark to test the other raytracing method it supports, and that crashes the executable because it apparently can’t find the extensions it’s looking for.

Nevertheless it runs at around 60 fps at 1080p on an RX 6600 with resolution scaling set to 65%, which doesn't trail the Windows version with the same card too much at all. There is some minor visual corruption at the periphery of the screen, but with some more testing and bugfixes that can probably be fixed. Back to Stroggos I go...

130

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

« on: January 08, 2023, 06:24:48 pm »

On balance, what’s the most hassle-free way to install a 6.1 kernel to Fedora on Power9? I’ll accept steps to manually compile it, but am hoping to test my Radeon RX 6600 soon and it seems like every week we get another kernel 6.0.xx release.

131

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

« on: January 01, 2023, 01:24:53 pm »

It looks like post-Skylake GPUs will be supported in a new Xe/Arc driver in Linux going forward. At least some of that is likely tied to removing x86isms that would keep Intel out of datacenters running ARM64, Power, and RISC-V servers in the datacenters Intel is eager to grow into. So let's hope for good things!

132

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Necessary firmware for Navi14

« on: January 01, 2023, 01:13:51 pm »

@MPC7500 If you blacklist the AST can you interact with Petitboot?

Yes - if you flash the correct firmware to Skiroot's BOOTKERNFW section. But knowing which subset of the multiple megabytes of modern Radeon firmware to load into the ~1.8MB sector allocated for storing that firmware was why I created this thread back in late July of 2022... and I still don't know the answer there. So now I just toggle inputs between an HDMI to the BMC video and DisplayPort to the Radeon as needed.

133

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

« on: December 22, 2022, 11:58:29 am »

And actually it did it on the Blackbird today when I tried to update it. So I think something regressed.

That’s oddly reassuring, in a way. Glad the regression isn’t somehow isolated to my machine.

134

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

« on: December 20, 2022, 07:51:38 pm »

In order for petitboot to see the new kernels you must run the following commands after the update:

Code: [Select]

$ sudo grub2-mkconfig > /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

This situation is due to an error in the /usr/lib/kernel.d/99-grub-mkconfig.install script on lines 28 and 29.
The script expects the Pettitboot version in Num1.Num2.Num3 format and reads the values in CRC1-CRC2 format.

This worked a treat, thank you! Once I'm done with some holiday traveling, I will start writing down some of what I've learned in getting Fedora to go my way. Periodically it wants to take several minutes to shut down, and I haven't had any luck looking at console output to see what's making it spin its wheels... but if that's the only wrinkle I run into, I think I'm okay with it.

135

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

« on: December 19, 2022, 10:23:23 am »

I understand that’s an issue, but it isn’t the one I’m running into. dnf has installed multiple kernels, and grubby enumerates them, but only 6.0.7 is enumerated in petitboot, and using grubby to set it to the newest 6.0.12 does nothing. What procedure do I need to follow to get Fedora to enumerate my installed kernels in petitboot?