Looks like I too had posted about this in the thread earlier.
I should note that the RCS Wiki isn’t quite clear on module types being shared across chip types; but I asked Adi Gangidi about it on Twitter. I did link to that tweet earlier, but it is pretty interesting, so I’ll quote it here:
Let me comment on La Grange Power9 . ( Scale-out Datacenter caterer SKU ) . Yes the SMT8 and SMT4 LaGrange chips can physically fit in same socket . However major difference is in management firmware being qualified on systems built with each chip.
SMT8 chip systems qual’ed with FSP for management , SMT4 chip systems qual’ed w/ BMC for management . As far as I know nothing HW wise prevents for adding support for SMT8 chips with BMC but is not done as of today
Vice-versa ( SMT4 chips being qual’ed with FSP/ PowerVM) won’t happen for licensing reasons . Different structure to use 24 core machine for PowerVM stack. I also suspect lots of cores / lesser SMT is not well suited for typical applications that run on that stack .
JSharp/justinrwlynn on the RCS Wiki, Twitter, and YouTube recently got OBS working on the Talos II. So as far as I know, this is the first livestream from an OpenPOWER system:
Mark Mentovai
Patch Set 2:
I appreciate the effort you’ve put in, but I’m not too keen to carry a substantial chunk of code that most of our developers have no way to validate, debug, or work on. The bare minimum to make me comfortable with this would be to either:
Clearly cordon off the new contribution as “contrib” and maintain it only on a best-effort basis. This would mean putting it in a separate directory, although at that point, a distinct overlay repository might make more sense.
Provide sufficient test infrastructure (try- and buildbots) to provide assurance that this port functions as intended and continues to work properly.
IBM made a celebratory post about POWER9, and while they did mention Rackspace/Google’s Zaius board, they conspicuously left out any mention of Talos II or Blackbird. Looks like I’m not the only one who noticed:
But it doesn’t exclusively say “on/in the server” either; and besides, Raptor will happily sell you a Talos II server, it’s not exclusively a desktop board.
A comment on the Talospace post mentioned that there was a Linux Power Architecture tower made by Terra Soft in 2008. I had never heard of this machine before, the YDL PowerStation, which used IBM 970MP chips. Linux Journal has a pretty good write up:
Initial powerpc 32 bit support has now been merged into void! Needs further testing and none of my package edits have been merged yet but they just want to do some more testing to make sure it works properly.
Yay! I’m starting to feel some juice again about it. I’ve had a rough past couple months so I’ve just kinda dissappeared.
Theres a new os out for amiga’s called Fienix. Theres also ubuntu mate powerpc remix, which got started again recently. I was going to bring up that maybe, for the stuff that won’t work, we backport from fienix, if we even have to at all.
Shouldn’t need to do much, the same guy who’s working on the ppc64le port is also doing ppc64 big endian and most of those patches work for ppc32. He also knows what he’s doing which helps.
The Talospace blog recently posted about an abandoned effort to have a common socket for Power, SPARC, and x86 processors:
I mean, interfaces like DDR, LPC, and PCIe certainly aren’t ISA-specific; but it’s kind of mind boggling to me. Is there any precedent for a socket shared between vastly different architectures?
For those unfamiliar with Power, POWER8 (and POWER9 Scale Up variants) talk to memory through a Centaur memory buffer acting as an L4 cache. IBM systems come with the RAM and memory combined on one DIMM, while this Yadro system has the Centaur buffer chip on a riser card, and normal RAM DIMMs slotting into that.
Daniel Kolesa has been watercooling a POWER8 on a Tyan board, which is really cool to see. The socket retention/cooler mount looks similar to POWER9 Sforza, so maybe we’ll be seeing some one trying this on Talos II & Blackbird?
The 4 cores run so cool it’s probably fine. I am going to see about borrowing a blackbird plus 8 core once the talos ii review is done. It’s basically done now. It’s interesting.
PSA - New mailinglist for Power Architecture community
There was some discussion on Twitter about the Power Architecture community being somewhat disparate across platforms that not everyone uses, and different subsets of the community. In response there is now an official community mailinglist hosted by the OpenPOWER Foundation:
A community mailing list for discussing developer/grass roots OpenPOWER and/or PowerPC matters - hardware and software.
Discussion around developer systems from the likes of Raptor (Talos II/Blackbird) as well as re-purposing older POWER hardware for use by individual developers is particularly encouraged.
All OSes are welcome - Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD etc.
Additional Links
Having the mailinglist now is good, but there will still be people hanging out at: