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RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

drewdevault.com

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Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#31

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

tpearson-raptor wrote: post #30
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A race of one is easily won :)

Well, to be fair I was thinking of the SiFive RISC-V board as one of the competitors, since my understanding was they did finally open the rest of their firmware a while back. However, yes, by far most of the remaining owner controlled systems are even smaller -- some of the smaller (older) ARM Chromebooks (sans GPU, of course), the BeagleBone black, those kinds of systems.

Yeah, I also have a HiFive Unleashed which is totally open, but it doesn't really aim to compete with Raptor iiuc. Until recently it also won out on open ISA, too, and the Blackbird has to be bootstrapped by the ARM BMC - which is a nonfree ISA. Power consumption is another story as well. Raptor systems is definitely the only realistic competitor to x86_64, though, for desktop and server use-cases.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#32

Post by tpearson-raptor »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #31
tpearson-raptor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair I was thinking of the SiFive RISC-V board as one of the competitors, since my understanding was they did finally open the rest of their firmware a while back. However, yes, by far most of the remaining owner controlled systems are even smaller -- some of the smaller (older) ARM Chromebooks (sans GPU, of course), the BeagleBone black, those kinds of systems.

Yeah, I also have a HiFive Unleashed which is totally open, but it doesn't really aim to compete with Raptor iiuc. Until recently it also won out on open ISA, too, and the Blackbird has to be bootstrapped by the ARM BMC - which is a nonfree ISA. Power consumption is another story as well. Raptor systems is definitely the only realistic competitor to x86_64, though, for desktop and server use-cases.

Yep, definitely agreed. FWIW we're not happy with the ARM baseboard controller either and are making progress toward fixing that particular concern. All I'll say on that is that the POWER ISA opening had to happen before we could start work in earnest on getting rid of the ASpeed... ;)

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#33

Post by tpearson-raptor »

tpmx wrote: post #24
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #3

> However, I refuse to give any company credit for waking up their support team only when a scathing article about them frontpages on Hacker News. I told them I wouldn’t publish a positive follow-up unless they also convinced me that the support experience had been fixed for the typical user as well. You are a gem and I wish more people were like you.

A very old, but still key lesson here for product makers: when you know that you're doing new, early-gen work with a kinda reasonably high probability of something faulting - you need to provide stellar, high touch support, whatever it costs. And you need to plan to be ready for that from the point when you ship your first thing. (I think this applies both to hardware and software products.) Of course, this is easier…

For what it's worth, we do have a focus on making sure the hardware works properly etc.; I've always been pushing for that and haven't had any real problems there.

This particular board was a test escape. A very unique, thankfully singular (so far as I know) test escape, but there's always a chance for that -- the larger failure in my mind was the breakdown in the support process. With our new controls in place (including rapid escalation / RMA of "odd" faults observed by customer) I am confident this won't happen again.

And yes, we're updating tests to catch the newly discovered failure mode. It's an interesting one, the board is a sort of a "zombie" in that if you boot it up by looking at it just right, it'll run stably and pass our stress tests, but it should never have left our factory in that condition due to the other faults. Full stop. :)

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#34

Post by tpmx »

tpearson-raptor wrote: post #33
tpmx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very old, but still key lesson here for product makers: when you know that you're doing new, early-gen work with a kinda reasonably high probability of something faulting - you need to provide stellar, high touch support, whatever it costs. And you need to plan to be ready for that from the point when you ship your first thing. (I think this applies both to hardware and software products.) Of course, this is easier…

For what it's worth, we do have a focus on making sure the hardware works properly etc.; I've always been pushing for that and haven't had any real problems there. This particular board was a test escape. A very unique, thankfully singular (so far as I know) test escape, but there's always a chance for that -- the larger failure in my mind was the breakdown in the support process. With our new controls in place (incl…

I totally feel your pain. You do so much work to keep things super structured and still bizarre defects escape or only show in the wild.

In fact I'm debugging a device in the wild behaving very strangely at this exact moment.

> the larger failure in my mind was the breakdown in the support process.

100% agreed. This is where your company failed. And now has redeemed itself.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#35

Post by classichasclass »

I hope this means some future work on Wayland performance on ppc64le or at least on 2D only is coming. My GPU-less 4-core Blackbird was unusable in Wayland with the basic BMC graphics (whereas it is quite sprightly in X.org on the same version of Fedora and with the exact same hardware loadout). I'll be honest and say I'm a Wayland skeptic generally for reasons I won't derail this post with, but I'm resigned to it probably being the future, and I would like to see it do better.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#36

Post by zwegner »

tpearson-raptor wrote: post #28
JackRabbitSlim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is far fewer modules and compile time options. A fun benchmark would be a Power9 Vs a X86_64 cross compiling the same ARM64 kernel. I wouldn't bet heavily on the Power9...

I might take that bet core for core, matched node size (i.e. 14nm), run out of tmpfs or NVMe storage, and with both systems protected against Spectre, Meltdown etc. (i.e. no cheating by ignoring the ISA specifications)... Slightly OT, but if you limit the playing field to open ISA / fully owner controlled systems, POWER9 is so far out front in terms of performance that it looks like an outlier. ;)

> both systems protected against Spectre, Meltdown etc. (i.e. no cheating by ignoring the ISA specifications)

Does the x86 specification say "speculation will have no observable side effects on the memory subsytem"? I wasn't aware of that. In other words, Spectre/Meltdown are bad security flaws, but I don't think they're the result of cheating.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#37

Post by qubex »

tpearson-raptor wrote: post #33
tpmx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very old, but still key lesson here for product makers: when you know that you're doing new, early-gen work with a kinda reasonably high probability of something faulting - you need to provide stellar, high touch support, whatever it costs. And you need to plan to be ready for that from the point when you ship your first thing. (I think this applies both to hardware and software products.) Of course, this is easier…

For what it's worth, we do have a focus on making sure the hardware works properly etc.; I've always been pushing for that and haven't had any real problems there. This particular board was a test escape. A very unique, thankfully singular (so far as I know) test escape, but there's always a chance for that -- the larger failure in my mind was the breakdown in the support process. With our new controls in place (incl…

That particular horror story led me to not equip our development team with a dozen POWER9 machines, which is a pity, because the combination of almost-total trustworthiness and enormous firepower was extremely attractive for our particular niche (plus, I used to hand-code PPC64 AltiVec “velocity engine” code for HFT funds back when Apple sold G5 Xserves).

I’m glad to hear that it was a one-off and that you have revised your support strategy, but... really, it made for a pretty frustrating read. It’s not chump change, and going out on that kind of a limb on... trust... which was clearly unwarranted at least at the time of that initial incident.

There’s nothing more frustrating than paying top dollar for something exotic and then being stonewalled by oblivious “tech support” when things don’t work as advertised, particularly when something is sufficiently novel or unusual that relatively few other users are out there to proffer help and the potential points of failure are plentiful and “unknown unknowns”.

As far as I’m concerned, that incident was extremely bad publicity. That board could’ve been shipped to me. I’d have been left to dangle from my solitary rope and squirm when management asked me what was going on.

That’s just not acceptable, sadly.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#38

Post by [deleted] »

qubex wrote: post #37
tpearson-raptor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, we do have a focus on making sure the hardware works properly etc.; I've always been pushing for that and haven't had any real problems there. This particular board was a test escape. A very unique, thankfully singular (so far as I know) test escape, but there's always a chance for that -- the larger failure in my mind was the breakdown in the support process. With our new controls in place (incl…

That particular horror story led me to not equip our development team with a dozen POWER9 machines, which is a pity, because the combination of almost-total trustworthiness and enormous firepower was extremely attractive for our particular niche (plus, I used to hand-code PPC64 AltiVec “velocity engine” code for HFT funds back when Apple sold G5 Xserves). I’m glad to hear that it was a one-off and that you have revis…

[deleted]

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#39

Post by rjsw »

classichasclass wrote: post #35

I hope this means some future work on Wayland performance on ppc64le or at least on 2D only is coming. My GPU-less 4-core Blackbird was unusable in Wayland with the basic BMC graphics (whereas it is quite sprightly in X.org on the same version of Fedora and with the exact same hardware loadout). I'll be honest and say I'm a Wayland skeptic generally for reasons I won't derail this post with, but I'm resigned to it pr…

What is stopping people from adding a GPU to this class of system ?

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#40

Post by tpmx »

qubex wrote: post #37
tpearson-raptor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, we do have a focus on making sure the hardware works properly etc.; I've always been pushing for that and haven't had any real problems there. This particular board was a test escape. A very unique, thankfully singular (so far as I know) test escape, but there's always a chance for that -- the larger failure in my mind was the breakdown in the support process. With our new controls in place (incl…

That particular horror story led me to not equip our development team with a dozen POWER9 machines, which is a pity, because the combination of almost-total trustworthiness and enormous firepower was extremely attractive for our particular niche (plus, I used to hand-code PPC64 AltiVec “velocity engine” code for HFT funds back when Apple sold G5 Xserves). I’m glad to hear that it was a one-off and that you have revis…

If I were you I'd be a lot more comfortable pulling the trigger after reading all of this.

Being worried over what might have been spoilt milk if you had gotten a broken board in the past seems counterproductive.

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