Recent Posts

1

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: AST VGA from Debian Installer

« Last post by SiteAdmin on June 05, 2023, 03:49:37 pm »

Almost fixed, not quite.  Still needs https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/merge_requests/743

2

Operating Systems and Porting / hibernate / resume / suspend-to-disk (STD) doesn't need hardware support?

« Last post by pocock on June 05, 2023, 06:01:33 am »

I already started another thread here about all the suspend modes, including suspend to RAM and the special modes of the POWER9 architecture.  I'm starting this new thread to focus on hibernate, in other words, suspend-to-disk (STD)

There is a section about hibernation in the official Linux kernel guide.  They state:

Hibernation

This state (also referred to as Suspend-to-Disk or STD) offers the greatest energy savings and can be used even in the absence of low-level platform support for system suspend.

This means it doesn't matter if POWER9 or the motherboard (Talos II, Blackbird, Condor) have any hardware support for hibernation.  The suspend and resume work is all done by the operating system.

The kernel guide goes on to state:

However, it requires some low-level code for resuming the system to be present for the underlying CPU architecture.

Is that code already available in any newer kernels?

Is that code available in any alternative operating system like FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

I did a check on one of my own systems and it doesn't appear to support it, disk is missing from the output:

$ cat /sys/power/state
freeze mem

Here is the same command on an Intel host, notice the disk support is listed there:

$ cat /sys/power/state
freeze mem disk

3

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: AST VGA from Debian Installer

« Last post by MPC7500 on June 04, 2023, 03:10:03 pm »

Should already be fixed, I thought. You tried this workaraund?
https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Operating_System_Specific_Workarounds/Debian#Bullseye

4

Blackbird / Re: where to list my blackbird?

« Last post by power9mm on June 04, 2023, 02:23:44 pm »

I'm located in USA

system has 32gb of ram, and a samsung 1tb ssd sata, 8 core cpu. 850 watt corsair modular psu

5

Operating Systems and Porting / AST VGA from Debian Installer

« Last post by siliconbadger on June 02, 2023, 03:57:24 am »

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=990016 was submitted by Tim Pearson to include ast fb module in Debian installer.  I have tried the Bookworm RC4 installer (released about a week ago, while the bug fix was merged over 2 months ago), but I still get no video from the VGA output.

Am I jumping the gun looking for this change in this RC?  Or is there something else I need to be doing (kernel argument?) to get VGA output?

6

Legacy POWER Hardware / Re: Dolphin Emulator banned from Steam

« Last post by Hasturtium on May 31, 2023, 03:07:10 pm »

Dolphin running with close instruction parity on Power9 would be an unusually nice showcase for OpenPower at large. That project would be welcome - if you have the background to do it, we'd all love to see it.

7

Legacy POWER Hardware / Dolphin Emulator banned from Steam

« Last post by isengaara on May 31, 2023, 10:36:23 am »

When I yesterday saw that Dolphin was banned from Steam due to a DMCA takedown request, I decided to port the Dolphin Emulator to the POWER9. A few weeks ago I had a look at the the IPL replacement modchip called picoboot for the GameCube. Steam never ran on on any IBM CPU, so I loose nothing if Steam does not my Talos II.

8

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

« Last post by ClassicHasClass on May 29, 2023, 12:40:14 pm »

Nice work.

9

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

« Last post by Hasturtium on May 28, 2023, 01:19:48 pm »

Update: I am not really a programmer but did manage to crack the nut of inserting optimizations into GZDoom's byzantine build system. Follow the directions at this page, finish the initial build, and then navigate to ~/gzdoom_build/gzdoom/build/CMakeCache.txt (or wherever you're keeping the source code). Open that file, navigate to the line (possibly line 68):

Code: [Select]

//Flags used by the CXX compiler during RELEASE builds. The following line is, by default:

Code: [Select]

CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE:STRING=-O3 -DNDEBUG Change it to:

Code: [Select]

CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE:STRING=-O3 -DNDEBUG -mcpu=power9 -DNO_WARN_X86_INTRINSICS
Repeat this for the line (possibly line 94):

Code: [Select]

//Flags used by the C compiler during RELEASE builds.changing the subsequent line to:

Code: [Select]

CMAKE_C_FLAGS_RELEASE:STRING=-O3 -DNDEBUG -mcpu=power9 -DNO_WARN_X86_INTRINSICS
Re-run the build instructions, which will overwrite the old executable with the improved one. This doesn't do anything about periodic performance issues for demanding wads using hardware rendering, but software rendering is much nicer!

10

Firmware / Re: Updating Talos II firmware to IBM PNOR V2.18?

« Last post by tle on May 28, 2023, 08:21:48 am »

The 18c & 22c parts are "paired" meaning 2 SMT4 cores share the same L2 & L3, unlike the 4c and 8c which are "unpaired" meaning each core gets the full L2 and L3 to itself.    This is not the same as "fused" (i.e. SMT8 cores) but it is quite likely that the fix will also work for "paired" cores as presumably the issue is sharing cacheable/non-cacheable pathways.   Good luck!

I think you're right about the terminology, but yeah, I doubt the IBM docs draw a distinction since those docs are exclusively written for SMT8 users.

I've successfully built a PNOR with IBM's patch; it installed without major issues (I accidentally hosed things the first time I installed it due to the BMC running out of RAM -- protip, don't put multiple PNOR images in OpenBMC /tmp/ -- but power-cycling the BMC fixed that). So far it seems stable, I'll be running it for the next month or so to see if any checkstops happen.

Would you be able to provide more details on which patch? Many thanks