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Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#91

Post by frabre »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #16

It'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…

I also have a Blackbird, and haven't had any issues with getting precompiled software or compiling software for it. What issues have you had?

I find it more performant than the kind of ARM hardware I think you're referring to, and more satisfying to use. I'd probably buy it again if mine died.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#92

Post by wmf »

frabre wrote: post #88
wmf wrote: post #4

It'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.

But Raptor machines aren't server-grade. They're desktop motherboards with crippled Power9s at higher-than-x86-server prices.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#93

Post by frabre »

wmf wrote: post #92
frabre wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But Raptor machines aren't server-grade. They're desktop motherboards with crippled Power9s at higher-than-x86-server prices.

I don't follow: how are they not server grade? How are they crippled Power9s? What x86 server are you comparing them to?

For example, the Talos II system has dual (server) CPU sockets with up to 24 cores/96 threads per processor; 16 ECC memory slots with 2TB capacity; SAS controller; out of band management and service processor (separate serial and ethernet ports for the BMC); a server form factor; better capacitors; no onboard audio and only rudimentary graphics; and a thick/quality PCB. It's also made in America. What else were you looking for?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#94

Post by E39M5S62 »

frabre wrote: post #91
E39M5S62 wrote: post #16

It'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…

I also have a Blackbird, and haven't had any issues with getting precompiled software or compiling software for it. What issues have you had? I find it more performant than the kind of ARM hardware I think you're referring to, and more satisfying to use. I'd probably buy it again if mine died.

A few major items were pain points for me:

* Firefox didn't have a Javascript JIT. That made using Grafana, GCP Console, etc, basically impossible in my browser of choice.

* Closed source Electron applications (Teams, Slack, etc) weren't able to run natively, and the browser solution worked poorly for me.

* I was using Void Linux PPC, a one-man fork of Void Linux. I decided that the bus factor was too high, and since I wasn't willing to switch distributions, I had to switch back to x86_64. This proved to be a good decision, because shortly after I switched, the maintainer of Void Linux PPC announced that he was stopping maintenance to work on Chimera Linux.

There were other little things that accumulated to create enough mental pressure to abandon it as a daily driver. It's fantastically neat hardware, and in my experience utterly reliable. I can't think of a single machine crash I had in the entire three years I used it daily. It can and does work well for plenty of people - it just wasn't quite right for me.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#95

Post by duskwuff »

_chu1 wrote: post #30
duskwuff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a group developing a POWER based laptop with a quad-core NXP processor What I've seen from that project in the past does not fill me with confidence, and nothing I've seen since has changed that impression. Even if the project results in working hardware (which is uncertain), its performance is unlikely to be on par with expectations. Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23988511 https…

I have felt the same way about it a bit, and I do think they need to change a few things if they plan to get anywhere with it. I do hope though that they're able to succeed, they aren't stuck with that design forever and what they learned could be applied to a successor model. They should really consider partnering or merging with Raptor Computing, the last thing the scarce POWER market needs is more fragmentation.

I don't think they have anything useful to contribute. The PowerPC Notebook project has had prototypes in hand since Dec 2022, and bringup progress is essentially zero. It took them until July 2023 to realize they needed a JTAG debugger, and as of their last update in December, they still didn't have U-Boot working. At the rate they're going, a lot of the parts they used are likely to be discontinued before the computer is usable.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#96

Post by sandwichbop »

frabre wrote: post #83

I 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.…

>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.

this is what I believe as well, too many people on HN seem to be lose grasp of the big picture in favor of a few dollars today. (but the big picture can only go so far i.e. Keynes's "In the long run we are all dead"). BUT the big issue that I fear many people are overlooking is the post-PC era. I made a thread on g the other day but didn't get much traction there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-PC_era I believe home computing will become more expensive and progress slows down as traditional businesses and "gamers" that currently fuel that affordability dry up and economies of scale inverts. Things like Talos and OpenPOWER will remain more stable in my opinion as they already priced in these niche market demands unlike other archs that seem to depend on a big net of users that every day is growing smaller as people migrate to cloud only solutions. I think it's advantageous to invest into OpenPOWER as an eccosystem even if RISC-V picks up since there's already big dollars behind it that doesn't depend on scraping the bottom of the barrel for funding. I plan to write this up with actual numbers some other day, maybe estimate a sort of timeline when this might start happening

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#97

Post by [deleted] »

TillE wrote: post #90
electroly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#98

Post by electroly »

TillE wrote: post #90
electroly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

x64 and ARM64 are both little endian on Linux and Windows; there are never endianness issues when moving from Windows/x64 to Linux/ARM64. You can freely assume little endian and that's fine in this combination. It's one of many benefits ARM64 has going for it that IBM POWER does not.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#99

Post by moody__ »

I really wanted to. I was working on getting a POWER64 port of 9front going, so far I have most of userspace compiling and linking but nothing for a kernel. A friend of mine had a Raptor Talos 2 that was having some issues that he sent over to me to try to use. I did a bunch of debugging of it and concluded there must be some issue with the motherboard. I have tried to contact Raptor some number of times to see what it would cost/take to get this machines repaired but have heard nothing. I've tried their irc channels and support tickets ... nothing back. This experience didn't make me confident in spending the money on a new machine.

In the meantime I have tried to do some work with QEMU but I ran in to some snag in understanding exactly how "hypervisor" mode works according to the POWER9 manual. It has some confusing conditions about hypervisor mode and managing the page table, I had tried to join the IBM mailing list for openpower and had asked to see if someone could explain how the hypervisor mode worked more comprehensively, but got nothing back. Of course there really isn't a wealth of information to help me figure this out the otherwise.

I say this because both of these were symptoms of the same problem. POWER is really not hobbyist friendly, both in investment cost and in support. There just isn't enough of an ecosystem in my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#100

Post by andrewf »

electroly wrote: post #98
TillE wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

x64 and ARM64 are both little endian on Linux and Windows; there are never endianness issues when moving from Windows/x64 to Linux/ARM64. You can freely assume little endian and that's fine in this combination. It's one of many benefits ARM64 has going for it that IBM POWER does not.

The commercial Linux world (see https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi/issues/4349) and other open source OSes (eg FreeBSD) seem to have lined up behind little-endian PowerPC. IBM still has a big-endian problem with AIX, IBM i, and Linux on Z.
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