Recent Posts

51

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: AMD OpenCL / ROCm

« Last post by tle on April 08, 2025, 09:33:45 pm »

AFAIK it's unfortunate that we won't be able to take advantage of ROCm HIP for Blender simply because ROCm's codebase is not architecture-agnostic. There has been efforts in the past to get ROCm code compile on PPC64 with little attention from AMD. Recent codebase move so quickly most patches for PPC64 would be out of sync.

I hope that Vulkan Compute would become more mature in the future. Wishful thinking I know...

52

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Raptor Call of the Shadows

« Last post by lepidotos on April 06, 2025, 06:13:19 pm »

Well, that's an appropriately named game.

53

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: The new 9070 XT seems like a really interesting card for Blackbird owners.

« Last post by MauryG5 on April 06, 2025, 03:25:59 pm »

Yes, in fact it is not yet the case to venture into purchases of this kind considering that we are still at the beginning and the support is only at the beginning. We will see how it will evolve, I am in no hurry to move to a new card, when the time is ripe and the support is complete, then I will carefully evaluate making the purchase. In the meantime the market settles and the software improves and becomes more and more stable.

54

Firmware / Re: Maybe bricked the firmware on my Blackbird

« Last post by atomicdog on April 05, 2025, 08:49:13 pm »

The flash chip needs to be configured to enable hardware write protection. It defaults to not enabled. So, even with the DIP switches set to disable writes it's still possible to write to the flash chip.
I don't know if the BMC firmware does or can even change that setting.

55

Firmware / Re: Maybe bricked the firmware on my Blackbird

« Last post by power9mm on April 05, 2025, 10:11:29 am »

The write protect needs to be enabled in firmware which defies the whole point of hardware write protection.

Is that where the write protect range is set? I know theres DIP switches on the board itsself

56

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Which .bin files to use

« Last post by tle on April 03, 2025, 07:43:41 pm »

this page: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU suggests amdgpu/dimgrey_cavefish_{ce,me,mec2,rlc,smc,ta,dmcub,mec,pfp,sdma,sos,vcn}.bin, which i've tried and never gotten to work. Maybe it's because my firmware is out of date. A guy on IRC told me you should just check your petitboot's dmesg (you can still do this over serial if your VGA is disabled with the jumper) and see what firmware files it complains about, which may be more than just the ones strictly necessary for your card.

It should be the dimney_cavefish. However please note that the BMC runs old Linux version. The known working version is 6.1.0. So you have to compile a custom OpenBMC yourself with newer kernel version... why don't you give that a go?

57

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] Raptor Call of the Shadows

« Last post by tle on April 03, 2025, 07:20:34 pm »

One of the best DOS games in the 90s. The port itself is open sourced by the original author.

Video: https://youtu.be/5ONEkjAw-1o

58

Firmware / Re: Maybe bricked the firmware on my Blackbird

« Last post by atomicdog on April 01, 2025, 09:28:31 pm »

The write protect needs to be enabled in firmware which defies the whole point of hardware write protection.

59

Firmware / Re: Maybe bricked the firmware on my Blackbird

« Last post by Blissed on April 01, 2025, 03:43:51 pm »

Thank you, flashed using ssh and blackbird is back online
However it's still insane to me that freebsd disk partititon can brick the firmware and that was with the write protection enabled

Thank you nevertheless

60

Firmware / Re: Maybe bricked the firmware on my Blackbird

« Last post by draconx on April 01, 2025, 10:18:12 am »

As it sounds like the BMC is still working fine, if you think the PNOR is corrupted (this is what contains the hostboot and skiroot/petitboot code that runs when you switch on the POWER9) you can easily re-flash it from the BMC console, which you can access over the serial port or SSH.

It is also supposedly possible to do via the BMC web interface but personally I've only used the console methods.

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Updating_Firmware