History of the world. Massive ecosystem gets better overall results than any niche alternative that might be technically superior in some dimension.
Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
81–90 of 113 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
#82It's simply too expensive. People that want to play around with a non-x86_64 system can buy one of a thousand different ARM devices and get all sorts of software running on it. If you want POWER, you're buying old datacenter gear with all the downsides of that class of hardware - or you're buying a Raptor system where the price has skyrocketed in recent years for aging hardware. I pre-ordered a Blackbird motherboard…
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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
#83I care! And I know a lot of people who care, but we are still a niche sized group. I care mainly because of Raptor Computing Systems offerings, which I think are the main (only?) OpenPOWER systems available. I use a Blackbird, and I'm happy with it.
From my own point of view, I'm willing to spend a $$$$ premium on hardware where I can have assurances that from the time I boot it, only code I authorize to run is run. Where every part of the system has code that, at least in principle, I or someone else could audit and fix. People have valuable IP stored on computers and it's worth much more than a few thousand dollars.
If you just look at price to performance, you are missing the point. Also, the price is not out of line with other niche desktops such as Apple's or System76.
There's not a lot of competition in this niche. The previous system that was useful was a ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard, which could be librebooted (https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/kgpe-d16.html) I expect something new to come along in this space every 5-10 years.
For my purposes, I haven't fought with the software ecosystem, and was able to compile the very few packages that weren't already precompiled.
Here are some developments I think are worth noting:
* There is a libre driver for the onboard NIC. (https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw) This seems to be the only project that cares about blobs in every part of the board.
* Dasharo https://www.dasharo.com/ providing alternative boot firmware.
* Artic Tern, (https://www.raptorcs.com/content/AT1PC2/intro.html) which is objectively still mostly a development platform (that if you're skilled you can get to work) provides a completely libre boot environment and the possibility of controlling other peripherals using only auditable code.
A few things have not yet made it onto the board:
* Flexver (https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexve...) which would allow for verifying and auditing hardware, firmware and the boot process isn't commercially available yet.
* Ultravisor state enabling more secure VMs is still awaiting implementation AFAIK. (https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Power_ISA/Privilege_States#Ul...)
* I'm not aware of a lot of hardware that would take advantage of IBM CAPI 2.0 IO accelleration. Perhaps someone has some information on this.
* I'm not sure what the status of transactional memory is, but I'm not aware of it being used in software. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this.
These would be nice to have, and I hope to have them in the future.
The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Today we deploy to the cloud and work on Arm/x86 Do most web developers do things that have issues being cross platform?
There are _so many_ deploy issues surfaced by eg developing on a mac and deploying to linux/aarch64 (or, in my case, developing on x86 linux). Anytime you add a dependency on a package with a native component you're likely to have something to fix.
In the .NET world we're developing on Windows/x64 and deploying on Linux/ARM64 en masse at this point. I haven't personally seen an issue yet where I had to debug a Linux- or ARM64-specific issue. I think different language ecosystems have wildly differing levels of readiness for this.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Today we deploy to the cloud and work on Arm/x86 Do most web developers do things that have issues being cross platform?
Even modern C and C++ code generally ports just fine as long as you avoid things with unspecified behavior like exotic casts and weird pointer tricks. Have to watch endianness too but that doesn’t actually come up all that often. Also AFAIK there are no longer any big-endian architectures in common use. Newer languages are even easier. Rust and Go almost always port with zero issues. Obviously the same goes for scrip…
s390x (IBM Z) is a big endian holdout, with IBM in the wings still quietly paying for s390x ports of various open source software.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
#86The Talos stuff is cool but it's priced way too high for anyone who isn't taking a business expense tax deduction for it. Especially post 2020, the pricing for their products has gone way up. It's what, $6000 for the 4-core, 8GB memory entry level model? I know it isn't that insane considering what new and used POWER servers cost, but also is anyone using these who isn't locked into AIX or IBM i? Is there any real re…
If you're used to building your PCs, you can build an 8-core workstation with a bunch more RAM for about $4000. While it's about double what you might spend on a similarly capable commodity desktop, you're getting a Libre boot process, fewer blobs, and a different class of chips.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
#87It's crazy expensive, Raptor torched their own roadmap, and no one actually needs what they're selling. (People say they do, but 99% of those people haven't actually bought it.)
Part of the problem was that IBM (for reasons that have not been made entirely clear to me ) made Power10 require not only a non-redistributable firmware blob on the chip, but also on the off-board memory controller, making unsellable by anyone not named IBM.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
#88It's crazy expensive, Raptor torched their own roadmap, and no one actually needs what they're selling. (People say they do, but 99% of those people haven't actually bought it.)
If you're not used to buying server-grade hardware, I know it seems expensive. I think the founder initially priced it too low in an effort to make it as affordable as possible, found himself giving tons of expensive support, and decided to raise prices to the market average.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
#89I do care about big iron, about open hardware, but... I do not have the financial firepower to help developing a computer architecture, and buying expensive iron with limited software support is not much interesting. At least if some major distro do support OpenPower as a tier-1 arch, meaning almost all packages are there, updated at the same speed (almost, at least) of amd64 well... I can buy a classic workstation a…
The software support is good. I use it and don't lack for pre-built packages or updates. For example, it's supported by Ubuntu Pro.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are _so many_ deploy issues surfaced by eg developing on a mac and deploying to linux/aarch64 (or, in my case, developing on x86 linux). Anytime you add a dependency on a package with a native component you're likely to have something to fix.
In the .NET world we're developing on Windows/x64 and deploying on Linux/ARM64 en masse at this point. I haven't personally seen an issue yet where I had to debug a Linux- or ARM64-specific issue. I think different language ecosystems have wildly differing levels of readiness for this.
The platform of course matters less and less as you move into higher-level stuff. The necessary abstractions have already been built for you.
Though even in .NET you can still get bitten by assumptions about endianness, for example.