The POWER and PowerPC General Discussion / News Thread

i thought it was worth the giggle

If anyone feels like testing on G5s, G4s, etc.

That would be helpful (it doesn’t take long to build)

I’m introducing yaboot as an alternative to grub for machines where grub is either buggy or otherwise broken (AFAIK it doesn’t work on cell/ps3, and there have been reports that some powerbooks also struggle)

I’ll also add it in the next live image batch (for manual boot like boot ud:,\boot\yaboot, with grub being default as usual) as it costs me less than 300kB of space and it might help somebody

the yaboot splash screen only lasts a instant for me then loads into void on my g5 quad i dunno how to verify for you im pretty baked also

i ended up testing it myself on my G5, seems to be alright (boots, gives me prompt to enter stuff into, loads ELFv2 kernel off ext2 so the hackily put together e2fsprogs works)

of course, my /boot is an ext4 and i didn’t want to fuck up my existing installation so while at it I doubled the opportunity to test how it boots off storage media, created a simple partition on a flash drive, copied yaboot binary and a simple yaboot.conf to it, an ext2 on it with kernel+initramfs, made that boot and it… worked… all you need is to put yaboot.conf next to the yaboot binary and it will take it

so yeah… I’ll offer yaboot as an alternative way to boot from the live media, and I’ll ship the package installed on the live media, though I will not offer it in installer (most likely) as it’s just too wonky and the caveats are big:

1. while your bootstrap partition, kernel partition and root partition can be completely different and yaboot itself does not care and you can configure it right, the generator (yabootconfig) will not and will generate some brokenness, e.g. my root-on-NVMe style setup confuses it in an amusing way
2. it will not read kernels off ext4, at least not with extents on (which makes sense considering it was never made to and it requires an old version of e2fsprogs; it can do at most ext3)
3. i just don’t trust these ugly old scripts to do the right thing always
4. the scripts don’t support removable media at all even though yaboot can boot from them
   …

I may be able to test it this weekend on the PS3

A tale of unsupported Raptors (falling from DeviceTrees? )

Drew Devault (known for working on sway + wlroots) wrote about his bad experiences with support for his Blackbird board:

As I gather, this was a combination of:

• Severe+rare+exotic issues with a CPU
• Little/no feedback from support
• Order glitch (RAM charged, but not included in shipment)

As described in the second blog post, this was resolved and changes made to prevent the support lapse from happening again, and making RMA more easily accessible. The blog posts go into further detail.

However, in the interim between the first and second blog posts, this issue garnered some (well deserved) attention on HackerNews. I noticed there was a curious snippet from Timothy Pearson (who @wendell interviewed in April) about potentially no longer selling to individuals; I will not quote it here as believe the context is important, but I would hope that Wendell could ask Timothy about this in any potential future interviews. I can see how it could be easily misunderstood by some as threat of sorts, of “don’t complain or we won’t even bother selling to you”.

I mean its still a young company. Shit happens. I thought you meant software support for a second.

I think Drew D. was quite fair in his treatment of the situation.

I heavily sympathise with Raptor’s situation, but some of what Timothy was saying was inappropriate in a comment thread in response to a paying customer’s issues, or would have been even more so in a support ticket response to that same customer.

I think discussing your or your company’s concerns for the viability of selling to individuals is a worthwhile thing to discuss, as is discussing the impact of bad press, but doing so a few replies away from your apology leaves a really bad taste in one’s mouth; one of insincerity.

it should work but perhaps too much of a potato to be useful for anything - too little RAM particularly…

Well foxlet got it running so

More Raptor/POWER9 news

Ultravisor state added in DD2.3 stepping

From their wiki, RCS Wiki, I had heard about the ultravisor state before, but it sounded like it was only going to ship with POWER10. It seems bizzare that adding an additional privilege level would not even change the major version number of the stepping.

Edit: by the time I posted this, the 4 and 8-core DD2.3 Sforza chips are already listed on Raptor’s product page, branded as “POWER9 v2”. The 4-core DD2.3 is ~1.2 times the cost of the DD2.2, and the 8-core is ~1.125 times. So marked up by a fifth or an eighth of DD2.2.

Here’s my quick reference table, prices as of 2019-11-07 (like @oldellian, I too like looking at the per-core cost):

Talos II officially certified as RYF by FSF

https://www.fsf.org/news/talos-ii-mainboard-and-talos-ii-lite-mainboard-now-fsf-certified-to-respect-your-freedom

The Talos II boards are now officially certified as Respects Your Freedom (RYF) by the Free Software Foundation. While there are many who care little about this sort of thing, I imagine the percentage of people willing to pay for a Talos board is much higher among those who are curious about the FSF’s activities.

A certification cannot really hurt, though I would be curious just how thoroughly FSF audits such things. I imagine anyone actively and significantly repulsed by FSF’s stamp of approval was probably not willing to purchase to begin with.

RCS Forum

Raptor now has a forum of their own,
https://forums.raptorcs.com/

The software they are using is Simple Machines Forum (SMF); they mentioned on Twitter the impediments to using Discourse on Power architecture:

Not vBulletin, auto traysh /s

I came across a video about an IBM storage appliance/component for their Z mainframes that uses POWER9 chips. I also remember reading that for the E980 systems, there is a separate management box (HMC) that is also running on POWER9, although the predecessor (E880) used x86.

It makes me wonder how IBM internally thinks about and uses these chips. In a consumer setting, you usually have only one large x86 processor with everything else (trackpad, mouse, router, hard drive, etc.) using low power ARM or MIPS chips. It is a bit jarring to see IBM taking a proper server CPU and just using it to run storage interfaces or management boxes. Is that overkill, or do I just not have a good sense of scale for this?

The storage machine could make sense, if z14 mainframes really are spitting out constant I/O requests (I remember when Timothy Pearson had that talk with @wendell he mentioned POWER9 being notably good at high load) but the Hardware Management Controller seems strange. The IBM Systems Magazine site I linked does mention customers wanting to move away from Lenovo x86 HMCs for security reasons (Lenovo is a PRC company) so changing to an in-house CPU makes sense, but do you really need that much computing power for a hardware management device? If the x86 CPU was something specifically fabbed for low power, even if for enterprise customers the added CPU cost is relatively minimal, would not power consumption be an issue?

I’m going to start working on my youtube channel again. However, all my hardware is garbo for rendering video. I could do it on the laptop I’m recording from, but only 500GB of space. Had a hard drive, its connecting cable died, and I’m not waiting 2 weeks just to have more processor oomph.

I’m about to crack my Gen 2 PS3 and get linux on it. Would there be a way for me to edit everything in FCX or KDL and then dump it out to FFMPEG on my PS3? Or at least… a PS3? Doesn’t have to be the gen 2 I have because of the early faults in the chip.

@THEkitchenSINK Have you done any FFMPEG tests on your quad yet?

I have but need more time to test as I’m getting ram and fiber set up for the file storage

lmk i still need to do tests yet

If a PS3 is running linux as a base OS, do I have to install the nvidia 304 drivers to use the 7800GT?

That would legit suck if true.

Nvidia drivers aren’t available for PPC64 (big endian), you’re stuck with nouveau.