If I can find a few I need to load up a system with as many as it will take for XBPS
G5’s will do for now but I think a few 180’s would be a good midground.
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This doesn’t look like its going anywhere though, no updates in like 9mo.
Yea but you can’t really have a monitor come off of a router, unless it has some built in hidden display hardware where a header can be soldered to the board?
Not on the device itself, I don’t see why you’d want to use it for desktop usage though as most applications wouldn’t have acceleration anyway meaning that they would run very slow.
Anyone @here has any example of a petitboot boot config file? I can’t find anything on how Petitboot files need to be configured. Petitboot can read uboot configs somehow, but I just want a simple file that I can edit on my /boot partition for petitboot to read.
I want to mention in a file the kernel, initrd, device tree and boot arguments. I have the boot arguments from an insanely large uboot config, but I want to standardize it. For some reason, petitboot successfully boots a gziped vmlinuz and a uInitrd (u-boot initrd image), but if I manually select an uncompressed vmlinuz and initrd or initramfs and the dtb, it doesn’t boot, just fails kexec.
Well this is what I mean about a PPC “computer” and I think many other people are thinking the same things. To use actual software on PPC powered computers, not just run software over telnet/ssh.
I can’t feed out too much info from my projects, but I can say that the ppc er… Community of sorts is very tight knit and very locked on to their target. I doubt that the laptop will get more than preorders for sale unless LTT does something stupid with it.
The one thing is that, from my perspective, I’m not sure how PPC can really make a marketted comeback via ibm. I think it will literally have to be the Plan9 of modern pc platforms to get anywhere.
RN I am pushing for a distributed compute tool for G4’s and G5’s for void and xbps-src. But I will likely have to do that myself, as with many other projects that people immediately snapped up from me and ran off with.
At some point I’ll get tired of this naked monkey beep boop charade and belt RMS in the face with a laptop and just dissappear into the woods.
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It needs to be able to unpack system boot up in RAM. As well as set any parameters needed in ofw
Lulw who is this dude and why is he here
Ok bro heres the thing,. Cross testing architectures is stupid. Yeah I could make a rockchip run circles around anything, play fucking switch games even, but heres the thing, arm was basically built to do that from the start.
Arm is optimized first nad foremost for short execution reaction time. It needs ho do it as fast as the sound now dies in echo in a room. So if its crashing through media tasks like that, often having a hard wired sector on chip for that, vs x86 which is sorta getting more complicated… If uh… If metaframing is cool to you I guess.
Ppc is basically built to eat data like rick ross eats ass. Your cache time and vector unit have to work together a lot. As well, you have a natural built in vector engine, meaning that, if done correctly and actually optimized, you can geterally keep a system going for way too long in comparisons to other systems.
However as ppc is literally supercomputer spec, you have to go back and reoptimize A LOT. Something that the average user just doesn’t want to do. Amorphic updates and an on chip AI engine in the newest chips can keep that shit tied down though.
You can compare them if you want, but they literally do different things. Just because something runs cinebench doesn’t mean it does the same thing on beth machines.
Also you are wrong, the Wii uses a mopified NXP G3 while the WiiU uses PA6 related tricore hardware with an ARM coprocessor.
And thats the other thing is knowing that info is a lot different than using that info.
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My bad, I just went with the information Wikipedia listed. I never said PPC wasn’t capable but I’m still curious about the hype of old hardware that wasn’t very powerful to begin with (you obviously need to factor in pricing etc). 
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Just wanted to explain that bc ppl don’t even know comparing different architectures is kinda weak unless you are a marketing company like LTT. Their goal is to sell whatever ysstem is advertised. Ie, thinking about their M1 coverage, and others.
And you DO have a point about arm. You have a very good point about all of that in fact, and yes for now newer tech will be faster. However the practice of using the older stuff is to A, learn how to actually optimize a platform, and to B show that all the senseless ewaste is nonsense, at least from my perspective.
I summize that in roughly 60 years the world will be on a new die platform. Whether its graphine or diamonds or something else, who knows. But what SHOULD be addressed is the literal wasted silicon that ends up as an 3y17u or whatever garbage that crap is that intel calls “low power”. Like, I’m saorry, I’m from a time when low voltage CPU’s were still the same clockspeed as the high voltage ones and you could get a pentium M 778 and overclock the fucking snot out of it. We literally don’t have that anymore. There is n o t h i n g.
But, what we still have is… the old tech. Not that long ago we had ipods and cameras and shit. Now everyone is in a race to pack everything into a phone. The entire movement as a whole is to show, hey thats kinda stupid.
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I agree, most of the movement today is dumb. We barely have new tech that isn’t stuffed into a phone and everything else is lacking because of it. X86 is flying but they aren’t doing it right because people don’t even need that level of performance. Every company is pushing forward towards devices you can’t repair, you can’t update and you have to replace every other year which just creates more waste.
Building platforms that work on old devices will help to re-purpose lots of old hardware that would be thrown out or is thrown out and can now be “recycled” because the reality is that many devices with the proper optimization have more than enough performance for everyday tasks that people actually do.
Eh. I’m not as passionate as you guys are. It looks interesting and different and the current offerings also work under the premise of an open platform. I like it.
However I don’t buy too much into the superior platform thing. I mean if you read the ideas behind IA-64 they sound wonderful and revolutionary to execute similar instructions in parallel. How do we do that? Ah that’s the compiler problem. Win win for hardware engineers right?
There is a reason x86 and amd64 dominates and that is reason is toolkit and software not some perfectly designed instruction set.
And speaking of software that’s also why stuff cameras are going away and everything is becoming a software component on a smartphone. Software makes it better. Take RAID as an example. RAID used to be mainly done from dedicated microcontrollers and software raid was often regarded as a joke. Today you have much more elegant and efficient implementations running on software.
Though having said that we do need something that is not incumbent on patents or geopolitical for general computing.
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This is true, to a certain degree. At some point though old tech just is hurting more than helping.
Case in point, a Gen 1 Core 2 extreme Quadcore Intel chip from 2006 had a TDP of 140W. Today you can get twice that performance in 35W TDP.
There will be a point when there is no sense in keeping old hardware alive anymore. That said, it is up to each and every one of us to decide when it is time to send the workhorse to the butcher shop.
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Well I totally understand that. I have some old Magny-Cors Opteron servers sitting around my house for 5 years now… I bought them on liquidation for a project and never used them. The amount of power they draw vs the performance is just too low… My 3900x beats one of these systems with their stock configurations and they are using 4x the wattage…
It costs too much to colocate them because of their big power requirements (and larger sizes) so I instead build 1-2U microservers with MicroATX or MiniITX AM4 APU’s because they are overall faster than most rackmount servers from the last decade. Then I colocate them at bottom dollar because they are small and sip power with most of my microservers never using more than 75W of power (and a couple not going over 45W).
I do still use an AMD A4 3400 for my FreeNAS system and a Phenom II x3 710 for one of my colos (mainly because its on the other side of the planet now, and importing new hardware into that county has become prohibitively expensive in the recent years) but neither of those uses that much power…
So when I meant repurposing old hardware; I mostly was referring to things such as phones, tablets, consoles, mini PC’s, etc. Units which are useful but cannot be used really today due to no software support and all their packages or software versions being outdated.
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I think Wendell made a video long time ago about repurposing old phones into IP cameras, webcams and small web servers. They can also be used as a home controller hub, kind of like the google nest on people’s walls, but instead it’s a old phone with whatever junk on it that can control your Arduino-brained AC.
But even those don’t really make much sense, besides being free, as in, you already paid for them and used them as phones, so you got your use out of them. A pi (outside the chip shortage) with a display makes more sense for home automation.
Regarding the discussion above with old hardware using too much power and POWER related, the FSF moved their servers from old 2013 bulldozer chips with free BIOS to Raptor Computing POWER9 (assuming Tallos II, as the Blackbird had POWER8 IIRC). And now Trisquel 11 will support PPC64le.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/closing-in-on-fully-free-bioses-with-the-fsf-tech-team
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I’ve made lots of use out of my old phones. As music players from Spotify, as Chromecast “controllers” for different rooms, as baby monitors (although now my kids are out of the age of need) as IP camera / audio listening devices for securing my secondary property while under renovation, etc.
I have phones going back almost 9 years now that still work completely fine and batteries hold a good charge, but now especially after this years 3G shutdown & LTE restrictions; they are all useless for anything outside of Wifi Stuff.
For years my wife used her iPhone 4S in our Bose dock to play music for my kids going to sleep. Recently the iPhone died (or atleast it claims its erased and hasn’t ever been setup now and also doesn’t accept her old iCloud password) and now we are using my HTC 10 to play music via their new TV soundbar (which also has a BT option).
IT can be used in the same room to push videos to their TV via chromecast, and is often easier to search and navigate YT with vs the TV remote & integrated search.
My wife uses her old phone as a secondary / backup 2FA device as well as a secondary alarm clock.
Now here in my new house I use my old LG G7 as a music player in my bedroom to control my Heos & my soundbar as well as a “smart TV remote” with the integrated app + YT (although we rarely use it for this since we have it on our main phones as well).
I just imagine how many phones are sitting around everywhere which are perfectly good… since my wife and I only replace our phones when we have to (usually 2.5-3.5 years, unless there is some kind of accident)… and I still have like 5 devices sitting around.
Interesting documentary about IA-64. This shit killed such iconic companies that got onboard with the idea that its not even funny.
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I am coining this process DeCycling. You are taking an item of useable value out of the process.
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I mean theres points to be had on both sides. X86 always felt slow to me because the exec pipeline is stupidly long. That doesn’t mean PPC’s 8 pipes makes it faster, however bad code in small amounts adds up to a lot of lost shit. Run windows 7 for 3 months on a machine and then run windows 10 on the exact same hardware. You’ll see what I mean.
And no I’m not claiming older OS’s are better, its a comparison of how many calls are made and the time between click and exec.
Systems need to keep an idea of lightweight design or we’ll have 1TB games in no time.
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