The POWER and PowerPC General Discussion / News Thread

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 .

@FaunCB Saw this on Twitter and thought of you; someone is testing Void Linux on their Talos II:

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Well theres been work to port to powerpc in my circle. Shouldn’t be hard for him.

Oh damn, I nearly forgot about that! Looks like he’s doing ppc64 big endian too. I should probably get that pull request done soon

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:

This is the guy who has a cluster with 4 Talos IIs and is planning on cramming a Blackbird board into a ThinkPad.

Edit: There is also a stream planned for Wednesday if anyone is interested. The chat is done on Freenode’s IRC server rather than YouTube.

Nevermind, looks like it’s starting in ten minutes.

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News about POWER10 being fabbed at Samsung, originally posted in the foundry thread:

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Looks like some of the Power support patches are being merged into Void Linux proper.
Talospace post - Github issue


Much better than the situation with Chromium, where the project has been reluctant to upstream:

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.

Note that I have the same concerns about MIPS: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/crashpad/crashpad/+/1064594#message-6c0734640a0c8117a0a44302f340bd38a2d31296.

Which was followed by Raptor and JSharp offering server VMs for a buildbot, and hearing nothing for over a month.

The patch is currently labeled as Merge Conflict, but I don’t see why.

The ppc64/le patches have been merged into Void as of yesterday :slight_smile: next up are my patches for 32 bit ppc. Shouldn’t be too much longer.

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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:

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Ah, I see the problem: IBM’s article is titled “The Year of POWER9”, not “The Year of POWER9 on the Desktop”.

:grin:

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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:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/power


Wendell’s Talos II made a brief appearance in an Epos Vox video (~ 2:45):

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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.

My first “real” contribution to a distro! Woo!

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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.

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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.

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Submitted a pull request for a kernel config for ppc32. Once this is accepted, all of the core components for Void Linux will be done!

follow me on Twitter

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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?


Also, here’s an interesting image I found while talking to Stewart Smith on Twitter of a Yadro POWER8 system’s memory card:

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.

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Looks like the Blackbird mATX board will be getting some coverage on LTT:


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Watercooling experiments

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?


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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.

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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:

http://lists.mailinglist.openpowerfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/openpower-community-dev

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:

Wiki wiki.raptorcs.com
IRC #talos-workstation on freenode (channel requires registration with NickServ)
Blogs talospace.com

As well as other sites that are not strictly Talos/POWER9 focused:

Blog of Adelie Linux maintainer catfox.life
Linux on PowerPC Macs (Facebook group) https://www.facebook.com/groups/ppclinux/
MacRumors Forum - PowerPC Macs https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/powerpc-macs.145/

MPC7500 on Twitter mentioned several other sites as well as a list of distro-specific PPC channels on freenode:

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