Recent Posts

11

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42

« Last post by migsutu on April 15, 2025, 05:34:43 pm »

Just finished fresh install of Fedora 42 KDE. Smooth and simple install. No issues found as of yet with the exception of the Discover showing 61 available to install even though command line with dnf says everything is up to date. Fast, responsive. Moving up from Fedora 40. Very happy to get kmail on ppc64le!

12

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42

« Last post by ClassicHasClass on April 15, 2025, 11:08:58 am »

I'll do my normal once over in a week or two when the packages have settled. Good you haven't had any major issues.

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Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 42

« Last post by tle on April 15, 2025, 08:26:28 am »

Fedora 42 ships the nearly-final GCC 15 compiler along with Golang 1.24, the LLVM 20 toolchain, PHP 8.4, Ruby 3.4, and a ton of other software upgrades. If GNOME isn't your thing, KDE Plasma 6.3 is available along with the Xfce 4.20, LXQt 2.1 and Cosmic Alpha 6 desktops. The new kernel 6.14.2 play nicely with ppc64le. I have not encountered any major issue.

GNOME 48 is actually quite good now. The only thing does not work for me is the new Loupe Image Viewer which is unable to view any image.

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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...

15

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.

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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.

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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.

18

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

19

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?

20

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