Messages

16

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

« on: November 04, 2024, 09:01:20 am »

I look forward to the upgrade, pending any weird issues that crop up. I may defer to ClassicHasClass's probable writeup before taking the plunge.

17

General Hardware Discussion / Libre SOC, uh

« on: October 09, 2024, 10:19:14 am »

https://lists.libre-soc.org/pipermail/libre-soc-dev/

I wondered what happened with what appeared to be a promising project, and holy cow.

18

General CPU Discussion / Re: 3U HSF End of Life'd

« on: October 05, 2024, 09:07:43 pm »

The "talk is cheap" thing they've got going is kind of nice, until it's not any more. Maintaining a joyful anticipation for Talos III/Blackbird II/S1 systems with no news whatsoever for more than 11 months (with the announced release date ending in less than two months) is probably not something people are going to do.

Not even on their Txitter? I haven't been able to check ever since the API got closed off for frontends like nitter.

Knock on wood, but xcancel.com still works for me in a pinch. Their dead bird site account has not updated since May 16th of this year, when they retweeted something from OpenPower. Prior to that their last update was in February announcing the new BMC firmware, which I have foolishly still not gotten around to installing yet.

19

General CPU Discussion / Re: 3U HSF End of Life'd

« on: October 04, 2024, 08:46:11 am »

If anyone is desparate for heatsinks, I understand power8 heatsinks are physically compatible.  There are usually some on ebay in various heights.  Some part numbers may be 00RR234, 00RR232, 00E8918, 01KL499.  I think the 3u with fan was only used by Raptor, so there probably aren't many out there.  3D printing a fan shroud is probably not too hard.

Some news would be nice, but I'll admit I'm feeling a little pessimistic.

That is news people can use, and it should probably go onto the wiki. I'm with vikings.thum - I love my Blackbird, but the lack of news while prices on existing products rise and components as foundational as 3U heatsinks are delisted feels a smidge like watching the water rise during a bad storm.

20

General CPU Discussion / 3U HSF End of Life'd

« on: October 02, 2024, 10:40:13 am »

Raptor's page has de-listed the 3U heatsink due to it being discontinued. Has the situation with the modified bracket to accommodate x86 heatsinks gotten to a point where they could offer those in their place? Feels like Raptor's in an increasingly awkward place.

21

Third Party CPU Discussion / Re: Why haven't we seen boards with Power9 / MicroWatt?

« on: August 31, 2024, 06:47:53 pm »

HiFive Unmatched $740

If you want to play with the Unmatched you'll want to order from Mouser - they have the same board on sale for $299. Caveats apply: this is being clearanced out because SiFive's Premier P550 has been announced and will likely ship before the end of the year. And they are not fast - performance is north of a Pi 3B+ but well south of a Pi 4, and there is no SIMD whatsoever. Just about any GPU made in the last decade will be bottlenecked in one way or another, though I believe patches are landing about now to facilitate RISC-V operation with current Radeons. I can't emphasize the sluggishness enough - maybe it was on IRC where a dev talked about how his Power9 could emulate a RISC-V machine that was at least as fast as the Unmatched, and possibly with more threads.

22

Third Party CPU Discussion / Re: Why haven't we seen boards with Power9 / MicroWatt?

« on: August 29, 2024, 02:22:57 pm »

If RCS sought to develop and sell RISC-V systems, I would have no reservations about buying any. It's not that I have any particular loyalty to PowerPC or anything. It just happened to be the most mature, complete and performant solution available.

Honestly? I'd love to, if the resulting device were decent quality, priced more in line with the performance expectations of RISC-V, and open source.

C'mon, Raptor. Sell us a RISC-V Shrike.

23

User Zone / Re: Unable to boot with NVIDIA GT710 installed

« on: August 21, 2024, 12:35:07 pm »

It looks like nouveau is barfing, and it has a history of not working with non-4KB kernel page sizes. The developers do not show any indication that they want to fix that. As you're running with a 64KB page size, that is likely to cause problems. See if you can manage to blacklist nouveau and proceed with the boot sequence.

24

Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Running GTA: Vice City on a PowerPC based wireless router

« on: August 15, 2024, 01:19:12 pm »

Oh yeah! I'd heard about this a while ago, but that blog is a treat - he revisited it in March and overclocked it for better performance! Thank you for sharing!

25

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] An attempt to package chromium for ppc64le in the official Fedora DNF repo

« on: August 04, 2024, 01:16:53 pm »

It was working but a little dodgy at v123, but an upgrade to v127 was pushed out, and now it bombs out at startup complaining about some kind of org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver.GetActive error. I'm still using Firefox ESR with the baseline JIT enabled, and holding out for longer.

26

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] An attempt to package chromium for ppc64le in the official Fedora DNF repo

« on: August 02, 2024, 03:01:12 pm »

After a bad initial experience I reinstalled last night and Chromium has come a very long way on F40. I still got a crash - honestly about 90% sure something on Facebook triggered it - but it did successfully run Google Earth at a usable speed, and that is progress.  Looking forward to more changes, and to seeing ClassicHasClass's Firefox JIT catch up.

It's a matter of me sitting down with it. Work has been really busy lately and I haven't had time for much of anything. :/

It wasn't intended as a nag. You're a mensch, and we're all grateful for what you do.

27

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] An attempt to package chromium for ppc64le in the official Fedora DNF repo

« on: August 01, 2024, 05:43:23 pm »

After a bad initial experience I reinstalled last night and Chromium has come a very long way on F40. I still got a crash - honestly about 90% sure something on Facebook triggered it - but it did successfully run Google Earth at a usable speed, and that is progress.  Looking forward to more changes, and to seeing ClassicHasClass's Firefox JIT catch up.

28

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Debian 12 status?

« on: July 30, 2024, 10:04:29 pm »

I put some of my observations in this blog post

The BtrFs issue is particularly annoying if you create a BtrFs using 4k on an external drive or USB stick and you want to attach that drive to a host running the 64k page size.

They made some improvements to BtrFs in more recent kernels but last time I looked at it they still said the combination of 64k page size with 4k BtrFs block size is experimental.  Then again, they still tell us the BtrFs itself is experimental.

Porting applications to POWER and porting to 64k are two different problems.  Trying to solve them both at the same time in an environment where at least some people are here as hobbyists may be asking too much.

Yeah, I'd forgotten about Btrfs, that's potentially a big one. As a self-avowed hobbyist and minimal dabbler in coding, that much is definitely true.

29

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Debian 12 status?

« on: July 29, 2024, 08:23:43 pm »

4KB page sizes are still required for the nouveau driver, and may be useful in bringing Intel's xe up on ppc64le too. The maintainer of Void Linux stood by the practice too out of personal preference and cross-platform compatibility.

30

User Zone / Re: Calling for gaming experiences

« on: July 29, 2024, 09:43:58 am »

The VkDoom project is an effort to improve GZDoom’s renderer performance with Vulkan, and I’m happy to report that it runs substantially better on Power9 than GZDoom if you have the right hardware for it. Build instructions are essentially identical to vanilla GZDoom, and outside of the lack of a ZScript JIT it runs very well.

DSDA-Doom and Woof are also excellent ports, and run much faster. Have fun Dooming.