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RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

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Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#51

Post by gawin »

smcl wrote: post #22
Athas wrote: post #17

I really like these machines. Unfortunately, I'm in Europe, where they seem to be harder (or riskier) to get hold of. I suppose I should also try to think of something reasonable to do with them, given their cost...

Fellow EU here: I was curious too, but the high cost + the insane import duty + risk of return. I'm 99% sure if I RMA'd it like OP did, the local customs would somehow not understand that it's a replacement/repair and sting me for the import duty once more :(

This is the main reason I didn’t buy one.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#52

Post by qubex »

tpearson-raptor wrote: post #50
qubex wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, too late. The decision was made and orders have been placed. You don’t get do-overs, sorry. I might still get a machine for my own amusement, but... I don’t know, reading of some poor guy left dangling for best part of a year just doesn’t build confidence and leaves me with a “ there but for the Grace of God go I ” feeling, you understand?

I understand. I also know this happened to no one else, and it was a pathological case in a support system that has since been completely overhauled. This is one reason why we started the self-serve RMA process -- to show that yes, we are committed to replacing defective hardware in a timely fashion. If the machine is defective, and we can't help via our online troubleshooting guide and Email / phone support, send it…

I’m not trying to guilt-trip you or anything... I really like the idea of having non-monoculture machines and I’ve always been a sucker for unusual hardware (NeXT, BeBox, IBM RS/6000, dual Pentium machines to name but a few)... but if the one prominent story I find online is about a poor guy who is left to cry his eyes out regretting his courageous and expensive decision while the company that supplied him is apparently indifferent (this was before the happy if belated epilogue) it’s just an instant turn-off as far as I’m concerned. You’re producing something unusual and new, and users take a risk and pay far above market prices for the privilege to be on the bleeding edge... the least one can expect is competent and timely technical support. This poor guy went through “please reinstall your OS”-level indifference for months. That’s not the way one builds confidence. And yeah, I’m glad you’ve revised your policies, but in my particular case it came too late. This guy bought a Ferrari-analogue and got a Trabant with Lada-level tech support. He’s been pretty polite in writing up a follow-up detailing your company’s long-overdue resolution of his issues. I doubt he’s asked you to refund you the months of lost productivity and the time he spent essentially volunteering his time to serve as a free engineering consultant. That’s just not good enough. Somebody should’ve swooped in before this poor guy became so frustrated he wrote it up and submitted it to HackerNews.

No DRM, full-ownership computing is great, and the performance is literally astounding (particularly for our use-case), but at the time the decision was made, based on the evidence I had, the decision was clear. I do not regret deciding not to buy your product because based on the data available to me at the time as far as I knew I would’ve been alone and/or I would have spent a fortune sending faulty items back-and-forth through customs, paying import duty each time.

Whoever decided not to be proactive in this guy’s case procured your firm a sizeable amount of bad publicity.

Not to mention that the team I am part of would’ve probably, as a side-effect of the proprietary software we are developing, also contributed various patches and so forth to various parts of the underlying open-source stack.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#53

Post by tpearson-raptor »

qubex wrote: post #52
tpearson-raptor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand. I also know this happened to no one else, and it was a pathological case in a support system that has since been completely overhauled. This is one reason why we started the self-serve RMA process -- to show that yes, we are committed to replacing defective hardware in a timely fashion. If the machine is defective, and we can't help via our online troubleshooting guide and Email / phone support, send it…

I’m not trying to guilt-trip you or anything... I really like the idea of having non-monoculture machines and I’ve always been a sucker for unusual hardware (NeXT, BeBox, IBM RS/6000, dual Pentium machines to name but a few)... but if the one prominent story I find online is about a poor guy who is left to cry his eyes out regretting his courageous and expensive decision while the company that supplied him is apparen…

No problem, I understand. In your shoes I may have even done the same thing.

Just in case you didn't see them (they're not exactly easy to find with Google etc. for some reason), there are a number of positive reviews or comments online from various people. I know one thing we haven't (yet) done is to start assembling all the success stories around our hardware; this is always challenging due to the number of people that use the hardware without posting online for privacy reasons etc.

Without further ado:

Slightly out of date (the software now available for POWER is significantly more robust than it was at the time -- we even have Fedora desktop ISOs showing up now for POWER):

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-rapt...

Various other (more recent) comments from our user base:

https://twitter.com/RobinBa40108750/status/11790782959813632...

https://twitter.com/tsundeoku/status/1171414555089494016

https://twitter.com/alnesbit/status/1170425263559254017

https://twitter.com/klauskiwi/status/1164273128588972032

https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1161438996586803200

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@jirka/102520125253219962

Just wanted to show a little bit of the other side of things, for context. :)

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#54

Post by zwegner »

wahern wrote: post #44
zwegner wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Meltdown is absolutely cheating as it speculates through permission boundaries. I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise in good faith, especially considering that it was only Intel and IBM effected. AMD and SPARC were immune, and the extent of ARM's vulnerability was a single register, which seems like a bug, not reflective of an architectural design decision. You can't design your software to protect against Me…

Again, I don't see that as cheating or violating a spec (or at least any guarantee made by Intel about x86(-64) behavior that I know of). I would assume that speculation can do just about anything (access protected memory, run illegal/protected instructions, etc), as long as any effects aren't committed to architectural state until the speculated path retires. The existence of side channels (timing information of subsequent memory accesses) for retrieving information from speculative execution paths is a different issue. Perhaps it was naive of the architects to assume this wouldn't have any consequences beyond improving performance, but I don't know what spec it is supposed to violate.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#55

Post by jacques_chester »

qubex wrote: post #52
tpearson-raptor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand. I also know this happened to no one else, and it was a pathological case in a support system that has since been completely overhauled. This is one reason why we started the self-serve RMA process -- to show that yes, we are committed to replacing defective hardware in a timely fashion. If the machine is defective, and we can't help via our online troubleshooting guide and Email / phone support, send it…

I’m not trying to guilt-trip you or anything... I really like the idea of having non-monoculture machines and I’ve always been a sucker for unusual hardware (NeXT, BeBox, IBM RS/6000, dual Pentium machines to name but a few)... but if the one prominent story I find online is about a poor guy who is left to cry his eyes out regretting his courageous and expensive decision while the company that supplied him is apparen…

I think the point is well-made and flogging it doesn't really add much. Raptor can't change what happened, only what happens next.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#56

Post by big_chungus »

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…

I'm really curious now; what's the skepticism with wayland? If you don't want to pollute the thread, maybe an e-mail would be better?

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#57

Post by wahern »

zwegner wrote: post #54
wahern wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meltdown is absolutely cheating as it speculates through permission boundaries. I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise in good faith, especially considering that it was only Intel and IBM effected. AMD and SPARC were immune, and the extent of ARM's vulnerability was a single register, which seems like a bug, not reflective of an architectural design decision. You can't design your software to protect against Me…

Again, I don't see that as cheating or violating a spec (or at least any guarantee made by Intel about x86(-64) behavior that I know of). I would assume that speculation can do just about anything (access protected memory, run illegal/protected instructions, etc), as long as any effects aren't committed to architectural state until the speculated path retires. The existence of side channels (timing information of sub…

What's the point of protected memory, especially when using VM extensions, and particularly with regards to SGX, if the architecture is implemented in such a way that unprivileged software can read the entire contents of memory and there's no way for software, either the kernel or the processing software, to prevent it? You can make a tortured, pedantic argument defending Intel if we disregard VM-x and SGX, that memory protection was originally intended only to prevent data corruption, not confidentiality, but at the end of the day all such an argument does is emphasize the deliberate choices Intel made to sacrifice confidentiality for performance. And those choices are all the more unforgivable considering Intel's primary motivation for taking these performance short cuts were to expand into and secure their dominance of the VM and cloud hosting market; a market predicated on the ability of their architecture having the nominal capability to ensure data confidentiality.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#58

Post by smcl »

gawin wrote: post #51
smcl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow EU here: I was curious too, but the high cost + the insane import duty + risk of return. I'm 99% sure if I RMA'd it like OP did, the local customs would somehow not understand that it's a replacement/repair and sting me for the import duty once more :(

This is the main reason I didn’t buy one.

Worth noting that I actually feel quite bad about this, I really wanted to try one out, and vote with my wallet in favour of more open hardware, an alternative architecture and to support a smaller company like Raptor. I eagerly followed all the news around Raptor (both here on HN, lobste.rs and elsewhere) and read all the guy "ClassicHasClass"'s blogs @ talospace.com - but in the end I unfortunately can't justify to myself the expense (when I spec out a modest Blackbird system it consumes the better part of a month's salary, I've recently bought my first flat and I sense a recession around the corner...). That actually makes me feel a bit hypocritical and part of the "problem", but maybe I'm not actually the target market.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#59

Post by tpearson-raptor »

gawin wrote: post #51
smcl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow EU here: I was curious too, but the high cost + the insane import duty + risk of return. I'm 99% sure if I RMA'd it like OP did, the local customs would somehow not understand that it's a replacement/repair and sting me for the import duty once more :(

This is the main reason I didn’t buy one.

Keep an eye out for an EU distributor of ours -- probably sometime late this month / early next if all goes well...

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#60

Post by tpearson-raptor »

smcl wrote: post #58
gawin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main reason I didn’t buy one.

Worth noting that I actually feel quite bad about this, I really wanted to try one out, and vote with my wallet in favour of more open hardware, an alternative architecture and to support a smaller company like Raptor. I eagerly followed all the news around Raptor (both here on HN, lobste.rs and elsewhere) and read all the guy "ClassicHasClass"'s blogs @ talospace.com - but in the end I unfortunately can't justify to…

Anyone wanting control of a powerful modern computer is part of the target market. We just haven't been able to drive the price down further at this time -- doing hardware design around fully open source firmware is hard and a lot of the typical shortcuts to lower costs (including the always-concerning "post-sale monetization" concepts) simply aren't something we find acceptable on any level.

Basically, it doesn't do anyone any good for us to lower cost by giving up the full owner control experience that is centric to our product lines. :)

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