Recent Posts

11

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« Last post by MPC7500 on May 11, 2026, 09:30:46 am »

You could do it via QEMU. But yes, you need someone to test. Cameron has the hardware, IIRC.
But yes, it's more important to make it work on le. I dislike Chromium.

12

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« Last post by tle on May 10, 2026, 10:34:34 pm »

tle: ppc64 is POWER8+ only, no PPC970/ PA6T?

Only POWER ISA 2.7+ and Little Endian only at this stage. I do plan to support Big Endian but the amount of work would be triple (POWER8, POWER9 and POWER10 fast paths all need to be carefully revised and tested).

I wish I could offer support for PPC970/PA6T but lacking of real hardware would make it very hard for me to pick up many issues.

13

Firmware / Re: Firmware 2.10 for Talos-II and Blackbird available

« Last post by tle on May 10, 2026, 10:26:11 pm »

I'm pretty late to this, but the navi firmware didn't work on previous firmware versions since it was too big to fit on bootkernfw. I swapped my rx5300 out for an rx560 and loaded the polaris fw to bootkernfw, and it worked perfectly fine for me- I get a picture in petitboot, and I boot to desktop in fedora without any issues. Not sure if it's something with navi cards, or just mine in particular (I don't have any other ones I could test it with). Guess I'll just stick with the rx560 for now.

Well BOOTKERNFW partition was intended to workaround the ever-growing kernel image size, it's interesting that you say it would not be able to fit the firmware. Btw I highly recommend you try to build the upstream open-power firmware version (please see my branch https://github.com/runlevel5/op-build/tree/amdgpu-navi23 and adapt to whatever amdgpu firmware blob you prefer and compile the firmware from scratch). Please notes there has been discrepancies between Raptor's downstream and open-power upstream version. The first major change is that upstream version does NOT use BOOTKERNFW (that means maintainers have to adjust size offset to make everything within size budget). Other changes are:

Code: [Select]

### Firmware components
| Component | open-power upstream | Raptor (Raptor GitLab fork) |
|---|---|---|
| hostboot | `6b6646f0` (2026-03-10) | `a98d7347` (2024-02-15 era) |
| skiboot | `v7.1-131-g9abbfe67df5b` | `ecb1dc7c` |
| hcode | `hw091323a.opmst` | `9b705d0e` |
| sbe | `e66523bb` | `f5dcee93` |
| occ | `3515ab0e` | `9ddc6ba5` |
| petitboot | 1.15 (release tarball) | `695b1d97` (git pin from fork) |
| machine-xml | (per-platform tree) | `e782e308` (Blackbird) / `cbd11e94` (Talos II) |
| libflash | follows skiboot | `ecb1dc7c` (same as skiboot fork) |
| openpower-ffs | `3ec70fbc` | `3ec70fbc` (**identical**) |
| openpower-pnor | `3e9fa97d` (open-power/pnor) | `92c0451c` (**Raptor's pnor fork**) |
| ima-catalog | `89e00ee3` | `3d30c7ac` |
| ppe42-gcc | `b4772a9f` | `84a6a88e` |
| ppe42-binutils | `c615a89c` | `2552229791` |
| capp-ucode | `p9-dd2-v4` | `p9-dd2-v4` (same tag, separately hosted) |
| pnv-lpc | not pinned | `90e170ca` |
| ocmb-explorer-fw | 4.0 | **REMOVED** |

### Linux kernel
| | Ours | Raptor |
|---|---|---|
| Version | 6.12.87 | v6.6.16 |
| Source | `kernel.org/.../linux-6.12.87.tar.xz` | `gitlab.raptorengineering.com/openpower-firmware/talos-op-linux` (Blackbird) or `.../common-cpu-ibm-power9/op-linux` (Talos II) — **custom fork** |
| In-tree patches | 2 (xhci, EXTRAVERSION) | 6 (xhci, EXTRAVERSION, AST palette, AST RAMDAC reset, AST DVO enable, powerpc gpr1/fpu) |
| Skiroot defconfig location | `openpower/configs/linux/skiroot_defconfig` | same |

And other patches that Raptor introduced to various components.

In summary, just give upstream a try to see if it works for you, if it does, we could propose to Raptor to find a solution for limited size of BOOTKERNFW.

P/S: It would be great if Raptor could rebase their downstream fork with upstream - lots of components are so out of date

14

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 44 officially released!

« Last post by tle on May 10, 2026, 10:11:51 pm »

Kernel 7.0 is now officially available in Fedora 44. No issue so far.

15

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Debian 13 Trixie is out!

« Last post by MauryG5 on May 10, 2026, 03:48:35 pm »

After a while, I finally figured out where the problems with the new Debian kernels were. I'm currently using the new 7.0.5, which I compiled and installed myself. The problem was that since I was still using X11 by default, whenever I tried to use a recent kernel, it wouldn't boot. I set Wayland by default, and it booted fine. I tried booting Trixie's current 6.12.86, but that didn't work either, and then I noticed it has 4K pages, which is probably why it's not working. In any case, I've now started using custom kernels on Debian again; I even compiled and installed a 7.0.3 on Ubuntu.

16

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« Last post by carlosgonz on May 09, 2026, 06:52:05 pm »

Yeah ppc64 term still it is big endian, despite little endian from power8, but i not sure  what this ppc64 is meaning for our hero tle.

17

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« Last post by MPC7500 on May 09, 2026, 03:25:08 pm »

tle: ppc64 is POWER8+ only, no PPC970/ PA6T?

18

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Upstreaming PPC64 optmisation patch for Google SKIA library

« Last post by tle on May 02, 2026, 05:21:13 am »

After digging in a bit, I do not think Google would accept the patch because they have just rejected a similar patch using translation shim for LA64 architecture. Their argument is that shim wrapper is compiler locked and that's not good enough. I hope there are someone in the community who would step up to port SKIA to use native VSX instructions.

19

Open Source and Libre Systems / Jeremy Bicha & Debian-Edu, Registered Sex offender

« Last post by pocock on May 02, 2026, 01:00:11 am »

I've put together a full history of the Jeremy Bicha situation, up to the point where he started working on the Debian-Edu package

Debianism spread many false rumours about abuse over the years.  In this case, somebody really is a registered sex offender and the debian-private messages suggest people knew about it but maybe they didn't tell everybody else.  They made inside jokes about it but I am one of the people who wasn't told when they brought him in to Debianism.

20

Applications and Porting / [DEV] Upstreaming PPC64 optmisation patch for Google SKIA library

« Last post by tle on May 01, 2026, 08:12:46 pm »

In the Chromium PPC64 patchset maintaned by Tim Pearson, there is a patch tor 2D graphic lib SKIA that would boost performance by converting SSE to VSX. It turns out Firefox is also using SKIA library too and I could see a MAJOR improvement in term of FPS in Firefox after adapting the patch. I do NOT believe that Firefox would ever accept a downstream patch for a third party library so my bet is on getting the patch submitted officially. From my own testing, the patched libs work well and have not produced any bug. So just curious why the patch has not been submitted to Google yet.