Messages

136

Blackbird / Re: Stereo audio channels swapped?

« on: December 11, 2022, 06:03:35 pm »

In most distros there's a way to solve this by copying the /etc/pulse/default.pa file to ~/.pulse/default.pa, then appending these lines to the end of that file:

Code: [Select]

load-module module-remap-sink sink_name=reverse-stereo master=0 channels=2 master_channel_map=front-right,front-left channel_map=front-left,front-right
set-default-sink reverse-stereo
Save, exit, and execute pactl exit at the terminal to force PulseAudio to restart and enact the changes. You may need to change the master= value if the system default audio device isn't the Blackbird's built-in audio, but this worked without much hassle in Void. I am currently trying to determine the appropriate procedure for Fedora... Red Hat does things a bit differently than I'm used to. That's not bad - I just have to wrap my head around it.

137

Blackbird / Re: [changed my mind! keeping] Blackbird, 8 core CPU, 32GB RAM, & Radeon Pro W5500

« on: December 11, 2022, 06:00:13 pm »

I'm sticking around, don't worry about it.

138

Blackbird / Re: [SELL] Blackbird, 8 core CPU, 32GB RAM, & Radeon Pro W5500

« on: December 10, 2022, 01:16:26 pm »

Sorry to hear that. What didn't meet your needs?

Honestly, it's nearly all been great. Sometimes dealing with snags in video support isn't fun, but I've got it running Fedora 37 with Xfce and a Radeon Pro W5500 with 64KB kernel pages, and it's quite snappy. As I edited the main post to show, I have dealt with a number of stressors IRL that have built to a head, and was thinking of how to apply the money I'd recoup by selling it. But if I did that, I would not only regret it, but the likelihood that I'd be able to revisit owning a piece of Power hardware would be quite low. So I am sticking around, and may ask a few more questions than I have to date. Thanks for checking in!

139

Blackbird / [changed my mind! keeping] Blackbird, 8 core CPU, 32GB RAM, & Radeon Pro W5500

« on: December 07, 2022, 09:23:05 am »

edit: I had hit a stumbling block of frustration after a number of other stressors in my life built to a peak this past week. If I were to sell the Power9 so soon after getting it, I would regret it a lot. This machine's been a wonderful learning experience, and is a lot of fun to use.

After a period of initial experimentation I've come to the conclusion that the ppc64le architecture will not serve my needs the way I had hoped. All my equipment is in perfect working order, and has spent its life under light load and connected to a high quality UPS. Here is what I am offering.

- Blackbird mainboard, v2.00
- 8 core CPU (v2)
- 3U heatsink, with fan direction reversed to work better in most PC cases
- 2x16GiB ECC DDR4 registered memory
- 8GB Radeon Pro W5500 with original box and accessories
- screwdriver for installing the heat sink (optional)

I am in the continental United States - the Dallas area of Texas, specifically - and will pack all items well and securely for shipment. While I would prefer to ship within the U.S. I am not opposed to international shipping; we can work something out. PM me here, or email me at freontrip -at- live -dot- com directly. I have a specific price in mind, but I am willing to keep the graphics card and sell the rest if that works better for you. Thanks for looking.

140

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

« on: November 04, 2022, 05:42:31 am »

As an update, our very own tle attempted to get an A770 working, to no avail. It appears Intel has not refactored the driver for non-x86 platforms yet. They’ve made statements previously about doing so, and it was reported in a quick piece on Phoronix, so let’s hope progress is made there in the near future.

141

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

« on: November 03, 2022, 10:04:54 am »

Thanks for doing so much investigating here. I'm sad to hear Arc isn't working for Power yet, but hopefully Intel's driver team will clean up the issues soon. To contribute a little that I've learned so far:

- ReBAR's reportedly a PCIe 3.0 feature, so I'm a little surprised Blackbird and Talos don't support it. The feature is important for maximizing hardware performance on Arc / Alchemist, but I don't know how drastic a difference it would make for the less game-centric 3D use cases of a typical Power9 build.

- The video encoding and decoding are not impacted by ReBAR at all. The A750 in my Windows machine is able to transcode a 1080p MKV from Blu-ray quality to a rough equivalent of x264's Slow quality at north of 325 frames per second. Better still, the video encoder is a constant for the product line - to my knowledge the A380 is just as proficient for encoding and decoding video as an A770. Given Power9's relatively pokey SIMD and the agonizing wait we've endured to see x264 adopt optimized vector code into the codebase, a $140 USD Arc A380 could improve video encoding on the platform by a factor of ten, and more in the case of h.265 and AV1. Even with ReBAR disabled, that card would probably deliver performance north of a Radeon RX 560.

- Arc also benefits from PCIe link state power management - would you need to pass i915.aspm=0 until someone at Intel manages to get that covered as well?

142

Applications and Porting / Re: Clion, VSCode, IDE options?

« on: September 26, 2022, 09:16:24 pm »

VScode is up-to-date on Void and works
https://github.com/void-ppc/void-packages/tree/master/srcpkgs/vscode

Yep, seconding this - works fine for Python, C, and C++. Only wrinkle was that I needed to enable 2D canvas rendering, otherwise the integrated terminal didn't properly render text. I do hope VSCode continues to be supported with the switch to Chimera.

143

User Zone / Re: Void Linux thread

« on: September 17, 2022, 10:35:56 am »

Just a heads up - it looks like Void Linux ppc64 is winding down, and will be replaced by Chimera Linux going forward. Details outlined here.

144

Talos II / Re: Arctic Tern bracket?

« on: September 11, 2022, 01:18:32 pm »

I don't have an answer for this, but I do wonder if someone's 3D printed a bracket that would work.

145

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

« on: August 28, 2022, 12:16:05 pm »

Unfortunately, as expected, the performance of the card is laughable like any other Intel GPU. The only interesting thing is the price.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-a380-linux

I dunno about laughable, it's just inconsistent. These are still raw drivers, especially on the OpenGL side. It's a little startling to see a Radeon 5500XT walk away from it so often - I don't feel bad about running a W5500 in my Blackbird. Nevertheless AV1 encode/decode, out-of-the-box OpenCL, raytracing support, and the low price point are pretty appealing. Maybe I'll stash one of these in a testbed x86_64 machine I'm thinking of putting together later this year and putting it through its paces in Linux.

146

Talos II / Re: Damaged motherboard?

« on: August 26, 2022, 10:42:28 pm »

You're not wrong to be observant. I'd be more concerned about the solder on the DIMM than discoloration on the socketed chip, but wait and see what support says. Good on you for being proactive and documenting with photos, and keep us updated.

147

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

« on: August 26, 2022, 11:21:08 am »

Hey, that’s cool. I don’t think it’d be faster than the Radeon Pro W5500 I’m using now, though Arc supports raytracing. Who wants to jump on the grenade and see if 5.20, Arc, and ppc64le get along?

148

User Zone / Re: Void Linux thread

« on: August 16, 2022, 10:58:23 am »

Another dumb question: I've installed xscreensaver and would like to use it instead of xfce4-screensaver. However, disabling xfce4-screensaver at startup via the Settings Manager's Session and Startup Application Autostart entry doesn't appear to do the trick. And despite entering xscreensaver settings manually and asserting that I want it to run, xfce4-screensaver periodically restarts itself and interferes with the process. What's the best procedure to follow?

149

Firmware / Re: network card to reduce attack surface?

« on: August 14, 2022, 07:08:43 pm »

so to clarify, the BMC on the blackbird is isolated and not accessible if one has network access on the other two ethernet ports. correct?

By all accounts that’s correct- the official documentation says that much, and it’s repeated on several pages on the official wiki.

150

User Zone / Re: Calling for gaming experiences

« on: August 11, 2022, 07:00:53 pm »

Quake III should run beautifully with a 3D card of nearly any stripe. Even a Radeon 5450 would manage. And Stalker would scoot along happily on an Athlon64 with a fifteen year old Radeon, so Power9 should be WAY beyond that. I’d forgotten how old it is - it really may be possible to just brute force it acceptably. I guess I’ll add it to my list, maybe start by installing it to the little Ryzen mini PC I keep for my Windows-limited stuff to get a baseline of expectation.

I can’t speak to the state of CS: GO’s source leak, but a friend of mine worked at Valve for years and was very familiar with the Source engine. Your biggest impediment would be the low-level optimizations, which as far as I know were hooked into x86 SIMD optimizations and not messed with a lot. There probably isn’t much AVX code there, if any, so xmmintrin.h could come to the rescue if you were brazen enough to port an illegally leaked pile of source code. Have fun and let me know how that goes if you do.