Recent Posts

1

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.11

« Last post by tle on Today at 01:35:01 am »

It's officially out. Not much news related to PowerPC unfortunately.

However preliminary support RDNA4-based AMDGPU is in.

Btw, RDNA2-based cards like 6800 continues to work.

Fedora 41 will ship with 6.11 (or 6.12).

Full changelog: https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-611-features

2

User Zone / Re: Gentoo installation issue

« Last post by witsu on September 08, 2024, 07:50:32 pm »

I think I've seen a similar error before and the issue was not being able to mount the root filesystem
I'd check if you are missing file system or disk controller drivers.

For my Talos I used genkernel to configure and build the kernel and create an initrd, and that worked for me.

Not sure if this is still a problem, but if you are using btrfs, at one point you couldn't use a file system created on a 64k system on a 4k one.

3

Applications and Porting / Re: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault War Chest (OpenMoHAA)

« Last post by gbudny on September 08, 2024, 01:35:39 pm »

Hi

I want to inform you that OpenMoHAA 0.70.0 is available for Linux.

The list of changes is below:

https://github.com/openmoh/openmohaa/releases/tag/v0.70.0

The most important information is the availability of experimental binary files for PowerPC users.

This new version ships with binaries for PowerPC, PowerPC64 and PowerPC64 Little-Endian. Currently experimental and the client may not work correctly.

I hope PowerPC users can join this project by contributing or testing this game.

I don't have a power system currently. I played this game back in the day because it had a linux port,

I had delayed switching to the kernel 2.6.8 on Debian Etch for two years until 2007 because I wanted to continue playing Medal of Honor Beta 3 for Linux. Sometimes, I still play the MoHAA created by Icculus on my old PC with Pentium 4 - it requires the old machine to work.
 
Interestingly, Operation Nordwind works with this version of the Medal of Honor, which is great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMLsOWmFwjc
 
Unfortunately, the old beta version doesn't support the official mods like Spearhead and Breakthrough, which both work with OpenMoHAA.
 

but I liked RTCW and day of defeat a lot more heh... I'm not very interested in it though. Whenever raptor sells power10 systems i'll maybe go back to messing with half life 2 and stalker etc.

I guess that everyone has their favorite games.

I had played RTCW many times, but I always preferred missions when I didn't have to fight with monsters.

main thing for me is better support for the ISA from ezQuake and Quake3e.

OpenMoHAA uses the ioquake3 project, but you can ask Smallmodel about Quake3e.

4

User Zone / Gentoo installation issue

« Last post by bernie on September 08, 2024, 03:15:28 am »

I have an NVIDIA GT710 that I'd like to get working with my Blackbird. After getting past the boot issue by disabling the nouveau module in Petitboot, I still can't get the card to work in the OS. I tried Fedora, Debian and Trisquel. Then, realizing that maybe the 4KB page size issue was affecting me, I decided to try Gentoo. I tried the Distribution (pre-built) kernel, but this also has a 64KB page size, and failed with the same errors as the others. So I compiled a kernel with the options that I thought best, but it won't boot with that kernel. The console output shows:

Code: [Select]

Run /init as init process
init[1]: illegal instruction (4) at 3fff894c8fe0 nip 3fff894c8fe0 lr 3fff894bcbdc code 1 in ld64.so.2[3fff89488000+4e000]
init[1]: code: 7ca32a14 7ca92850 78bfd183 41820084 73ea0001 7c070166 7d2a4b78 38c00010
init[1]: code: 39600020 39800030 381fffff 7fe8fb78 <f0000050> 41820020 2c200000 7c004f98
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00000004
CPU: 10 PID: 1 Comm: init Not tainted 6.6.47-gentoo #6
Hardware name: C1P9S01 REV 1.02 POWER9 (raw) 0x4e1203 opal:skiboot-ecb1dc7 PowerNV
Call Trace:
[c0000000021a7a50] [c000000000d6ee58] dump_stack_lvl+0x6c/0x9c (unreliable)
[c0000000021a7a80] [c0000000000da2e4] panic+0x170/0x3ec
[c0000000021a7b20] [c0000000000e3680] do_exit+0xa70/0xa80
[c0000000021a7bf0] [c0000000000e38e4] do_group_exit+0x44/0xc0
[c0000000021a7c30] [c0000000000f7d30] get_signal+0xc50/0xc80
[c0000000021a7d20] [c00000000001c7f0] do_notify_resume+0xf0/0x420
[c0000000021a7dd0] [c000000000028ad8] interrupt_exit_user_prepare_main+0x158/0x1f0
[c0000000021a7e20] [c000000000028d7c] interrupt_exit_user_prepare+0x4c/0x70
[c0000000021a7e50] [c00000000000d444] interrupt_return_srr_user+0x8/0x12c
--- interrupt: f40 at 0x3fff894c8fe0
NIP:  00003fff894c8fe0 LR: 00003fff894bcbdc CTR: 0000000000000000
REGS: c0000000021a7e80 TRAP: 0f40   Not tainted  (6.6.47-gentoo)
MSR:  900000000200f033 <SF,HV,VEC,EE,PR,FP,ME,IR,DR,RI,LE>  CR: 24000420  XER: 00000000
CFAR: c00000000000d55c IRQMASK: 0
GPR00: 0000000000000005 00003fffd6440800 00003fff894eff00 00003fffd6440820
GPR04: 0000000000000000 00000000000001a0 0000000000000010 0000000000000000
GPR08: 0000000000000006 00003fffd6440820 00003fffd6440820 0000000000000020
GPR12: 0000000000000030 0000000000000000 00003fff894e7f10 00003fffd6440fa0
GPR16: 000000000000fff1 0000000000000000 00003fff89488350 00003fff89488000
GPR20: 0000000000000001 0000000000000001 00003fffd6440fa0 0000000080001000
GPR24: 000000007fff9000 0000000000010000 00003fffd6440ac0 00003fffd64410c0
GPR28: 00000000ffffffff 00003fffd6440a20 00003fffd64410f0 0000000000000006
NIP [00003fff894c8fe0] 0x3fff894c8fe0
LR [00003fff894bcbdc] 0x3fff894bcbdc
--- interrupt: f40
Reboot[  148.135496306,5] OPAL: Reboot request...
It appears that something is wrong with ld64, but I have no idea what. How should I proceed from here? I wondered about posting in the Gentoo forums, but decided to try here first.

5

Blackbird / Re: Potential Aspeed slow failure?

« Last post by ClassicHasClass on September 05, 2024, 11:46:52 am »

Glad to hear it self-resolved, at least.

6

Blackbird / Re: Potential Aspeed slow failure?

« Last post by Badt on September 05, 2024, 08:53:41 am »

Hey, so IPMI shutdown issue is kind of gone..? The BMC log is still full of these error messages, but for some reason it doesn't kill the system any more; perhaps one of the PNOR/BMC rounds of flashes did it, but not any one in particular. It took a few tries. For the time being, we're back to operational. I'd really like to mitigate this issue in the future.

7

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

« Last post by MPC7500 on September 04, 2024, 05:37:55 pm »

Banana Pi BPI-F3 approx. $99

8

Blackbird / Re: Potential Aspeed slow failure?

« Last post by carlosgonz on September 03, 2024, 12:25:30 pm »

Thats is a known bug on old Gnu Linux version in BMC, so i not remember well which Gnu Linux version it fixed, but it is. I hope Raptor team release a new BMC version with newer Gnu Linux version like v6.0+

Thanks.

9

Blackbird / Potential Aspeed slow failure?

« Last post by Badt on September 03, 2024, 10:24:27 am »

Our production Blackbird had suddenly suffered a breakdown when the BMC had suddenly requested IPMI shutdown. We were able to reboot, and the normal booting sequence completed successfully, for the exact same event to happen 10 minutes later.

And it persists.

I had looked into BMC dmesg log to find this:

Code: [Select]

[  294.400092] aspeed-g5-pinctrl 1e6e2000.syscon:pinctrl: request pin 26 (F20) for 1e780000.gpio:306
[  294.400136] Want SCU90[0x00000002]=0x1, got 0x0 from 0x063F0000
[  294.400158] Want SCU8C[0x00000200]=0x1, got 0x0 from 0x00000001
[  294.400171] Want SCU70[0x00200000]=0x1, got 0x0 from 0xF1105206
[  648.795152] aspeed-i2c-bus 1e78a440.i2c-bus: irq handled != irq. expected 0x00001010, but was 0x00000010
[  648.805898] aspeed-i2c-bus 1e78a440.i2c-bus: irq handled != irq. expected 0x00001001, but was 0x00000001
[  648.817794] aspeed-i2c-bus 1e78a440.i2c-bus: irq handled != irq. expected 0x00001010, but was 0x00000010
[  649.661265] aspeed-i2c-bus 1e78a440.i2c-bus: irq handled != irq. expected 0x00001001, but was 0x00000001

This issue looks similar to https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php?topic=377.0

However, in our case the system is plugged into a UPS, and there hasn’t been electric failures of any kind. To be sure, we had swapped out the chassis PSU for a brand-new one we had laying around, and bypassed the UPS completely. Unfortunately, it did absolutely nothing. We have also tried re-flashing the self-compiled PNOR as well as the latest release & manually upgrading BMC firmware, and unfortunately it had no effect. Note: we did upgrade to the latest-release PNOR a few months back, although I think it probably had nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Should we proceed with dumping & re-flashing the FPGA now? I hate that it looks just like the issue linked above, but the remedies aren't working.

Best

P.S. Is jerry-rigged serprog-based programmer good enough for at least dumping the FPGA flash for inspection?

10

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

« Last post by kanunay on September 02, 2024, 06:15:44 pm »

I looked into this a long time ago and determined that the minimal investment required to produce actual silicon based on Microwatt was somewhere around $20 million. If Microwatt (or POWER in general) had the kind of interest RISC-V has, perhaps someone could raise that amount of money. As it stands right now, the only place we could ever hope of getting an actual chip from is IBM itself and I don't see that happening.

As for boards, there are people around who are skilled enough with KiCAD that an excellent open-source board could produced if a chip existed. For now, those of us who like to experiment with Microwatt have to be satisfied with FPGA soft cores running at extremely slow speeds (100 MHz and less).