Recent Posts

61

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

« Last post by tle on March 26, 2025, 10:07:12 pm »

Hi

Thank you for contributing to OpenMoHAA and testing it.

I watched your three videos with OpenMoHAA, and I'm surprised it works so well on your computer. I was expecting some weird bugs and stability issues because this project didn't have too many PPC Linux users. 

I know that Cowcat had some problems porting it to MorphOS (PPC), but maybe that would helped with some issues on the Raptor computers.

The POWER9 has more than enough juice to run the game smoothly despite of the fact there is no JIT VM support for PPC64LE.

62

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

« Last post by tle on March 26, 2025, 06:13:26 pm »

A consistent UI is what had BeOS 30 years ago, now Haiku.  All written in C++ and completely unrelated to X11. Strangely, no one came up with the idea of porting that ready-made UI to Linux, they just messed around with Gnome and KDE. On Wayland the most suitable for me is Hyprland, unfortunately it is still far from full functionality.

BeOS is truly a cohesive and unique ecosystem. However it is not fair to say its UX is the most pleasant to use. Big guys like MS and Apple are still trying to figure out the UX as the hardware has advanced at rapid pace introducing new ways of doing interaction. GNOME and KDE will likely play the followers role than leading the industry. It's unfortunate yet understandable...

63

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.14

« Last post by tle on March 26, 2025, 08:12:51 am »

It is out! More details could be found at https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14

There are no mentioning of any PowerPC-related changes unfortunately.

64

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

« Last post by gbudny on March 25, 2025, 07:31:08 pm »

Hi

Thank you for contributing to OpenMoHAA and testing it.

I watched your three videos with OpenMoHAA, and I'm surprised it works so well on your computer. I was expecting some weird bugs and stability issues because this project didn't have too many PPC Linux users. 

I know that Cowcat had some problems porting it to MorphOS (PPC), but maybe that would helped with some issues on the Raptor computers. 

65

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

« Last post by DKnoto on March 25, 2025, 02:11:08 pm »

A consistent UI is what had BeOS 30 years ago, now Haiku.  All written in C++ and completely unrelated to X11. Strangely, no one came up with the idea of porting that ready-made UI to Linux, they just messed around with Gnome and KDE. On Wayland the most suitable for me is Hyprland, unfortunately it is still far from full functionality.

66

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

« Last post by tle on March 25, 2025, 07:41:53 am »

At my place Wayland works strangely, and in fact a whole bunch of applications have problems with it, and I don't have the strength to inquire whether it's just the protocol or not. To me, it's just an incomplete product, which instead of bridging the divide between different DEs only exacerbates it by blaming the lack of support for a certain element on some DE or library. The result is that applications written for one DE will not work well on another. Applications with the latest Gtk are already a complete departure, they operate according to the principle of if you're with us it's ok if you're with us and if you're not it's off.

Spot on! Things have changed, we no longer have to mix and match softwares, WMs and DE like we used to. These days you pick one faction and stick with it. To be fair I find myself more productive with such DEs because of consistent UX. It's amazing to see how far Linux desktop has come! Having said that I sometimes miss those old days forever poking into countless of combination of configs and softwares.

67

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

« Last post by DKnoto on March 24, 2025, 03:52:00 pm »

At my place Wayland works strangely, and in fact a whole bunch of applications have problems with it, and I don't have the strength to inquire whether it's just the protocol or not. To me, it's just an incomplete product, which instead of bridging the divide between different DEs only exacerbates it by blaming the lack of support for a certain element on some DE or library. The result is that applications written for one DE will not work well on another. Applications with the latest Gtk are already a complete departure, they operate according to the principle of if you're with us it's ok if you're with us and if you're not it's off.

68

Firmware / Re: Messing with WOF Tables

« Last post by ejfluhr on March 24, 2025, 11:03:43 am »

Got my login working.  I used these two easy scripts to watch freq, temp, and power:

cat ./watch_cpu_freq.ksh
watch -n2 "cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz"

cat ./watch_sensors.ksh
# Watch thermal sensors
watch -n 1 -d sensors

My 4-core CPU idles at ~2170MHz, then when I run 1 thread of the aforementioned mersenne just one set of cores jumps to 3783MHz which is ~= 3800MHz Fmax.   So apparently frequency is managed per quad. 

When I run 2 threads, sometimes both sets jump to max, sometimes only 1 set...I guess it depends on which quads the OS allocates the threads to. 

When I run 4 threads, frequency maxes at 3400MHz.   At 8 threads, frequency maxes at 3250MHz.   So it looks like WOF is optimizing the frequency to the amount of power used by the set of active workloads on my system.

69

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Using Java's Vector API on PPC64LE

« Last post by icbts on March 23, 2025, 07:37:27 am »

I agree that it would likely have to be IBM to sponsor such a project.

Hardware, developers, QA, Project management, documentation, etc would be significant.
Could AIs help reduce the cost or cut time lines? Possibly.

I imagine such a team would take several quarters to produce something nearing an Alpha, productizing several quarters more.

Thinking out that timeline, we'd be in to Power11's life cycle, potentially the Solid Silicon chip would be real as Power10 compatible. The market will have further moved into AArch64, with RISC-V maturing towards early viable production systems. PPCs continue in their markets with constant shrinkage due to migrations. I guess it becomes a long term question - Does IBM have plans for Power 12/13/14 bringing the ecosystem through the 2030s? What is the plan to build development resources for the road map?

Perhaps I'm heading into discussion points for another part of the forum.


From my point of view the low hanging fruit is getting Java based applications to work nicely on POWER. My focus has been on Apache CXF, ActiveMQ, Camel, Karaf, Kafka - effectively SOA style services that business use in integration stories. POWER has a place in that ecosystem given its performance characteristics under load.

70

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Using Java's Vector API on PPC64LE

« Last post by tle on March 23, 2025, 03:32:02 am »

The core team doesn't seem to be interested in having it supported:
https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/5238

No idea how large a project making a fork would be; assumption is that its a very large porting effort.

I can understand why many projects choose not to simply because they do not have access to the hardware. What IF we could have a super performant x86->ppc64 translation in VM like how Apple or MS does x86->arm64... if IBM truly cares, I am pretty sure it could be done