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Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

peter.czanik.hu

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Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#31

Post by nix23 »

DannyBee wrote: post #28

IBM has had this argument internally for eons. When i was there, two decades ago , people were making presentations internally saying the same thing - "without affordable volume machines that random people can buy and use to develop, this ecosystem will fail" Then, like now, there were even organizations/companies people thought might eventually take care of doing this that weren't IBM (Spoiler alert: They didn't) Gi…

Yeah IBM is crazy with z/OS too, give out free z/OS developer images so everyone interested could play with it and maybe it sparks interest in mainframe again? NONONO pay ~500$ every year and you need a usb-dongle, and "master the mainframe" is just open for 2 month a year...it's pure stupidity.

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#32

Post by aidenn0 »

DannyBee wrote: post #28

IBM has had this argument internally for eons. When i was there, two decades ago , people were making presentations internally saying the same thing - "without affordable volume machines that random people can buy and use to develop, this ecosystem will fail" Then, like now, there were even organizations/companies people thought might eventually take care of doing this that weren't IBM (Spoiler alert: They didn't) Gi…

PASemi was stopped by an acqui-hire. I don't like counterfactuals, but that was a huge transfer of expertise from Power to ARM

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#33

Post by goodpoint »

marcodiego wrote: post #11

Don't forget that POWER10 is no longer ryf-certifiable. Of course the ryf certification may be questionable but it is an established bar, POWER9 was able to cross it, POWER10 probably won't: https://www.talospace.com/2020/08/power10-sounds-really-grea... https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1435510763402244105...

FSF RYF certification carries very little weight.

If you care about not having backdoors in your hardware, RYF is not very relevant because it allows closed source hardware and firmware blobs.

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#34

Post by DannyBee »

aidenn0 wrote: post #32
DannyBee wrote: post #28

IBM has had this argument internally for eons. When i was there, two decades ago , people were making presentations internally saying the same thing - "without affordable volume machines that random people can buy and use to develop, this ecosystem will fail" Then, like now, there were even organizations/companies people thought might eventually take care of doing this that weren't IBM (Spoiler alert: They didn't) Gi…

PASemi was stopped by an acqui-hire. I don't like counterfactuals, but that was a huge transfer of expertise from Power to ARM

I mean, this is true, but it doesn't really change a lot of what i said. It was always something :)

If your ecosystem is stopped in its tracks because someone acquired a small company, it is not a particularly robust ecosystem.

From what i was told (and i was very young and inexperienced when i worked at IBM, so take it with a grain of salt), the baseline issue was always the same on the IBM side - the chip groups controlled most of the budget for the chips, and didn't see any way that spending hundreds of millions to make developer-friendly hardware would have positive ROI. Most of their revenue was not derived from the customers they thought this might ever attract.

It's similar to why they told Apple to go pound sand repeatedly until Apple switched to Intel - Apple did not make up a really meaningful part of the business of Power chips from where they sat, so they didn't really care about giving Apple what it wanted.

The software folks involved thought this was mostly insane

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#35

Post by marcodiego »

goodpoint wrote: post #33
marcodiego wrote: post #11

Don't forget that POWER10 is no longer ryf-certifiable. Of course the ryf certification may be questionable but it is an established bar, POWER9 was able to cross it, POWER10 probably won't: https://www.talospace.com/2020/08/power10-sounds-really-grea... https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1435510763402244105...

FSF RYF certification carries very little weight. If you care about not having backdoors in your hardware, RYF is not very relevant because it allows closed source hardware and firmware blobs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30036588

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#36

Post by Nursie »

ashirviskas wrote: post #6

Can someone tell me where I can read more on what Power exactly is?

Power is a processor architecture produced by IBM. It's been pretty popular at times - server side it was up there with Sun Sparc in popularity, before Linux on x86 ate the server market for lunch. Client side, variants of it were in every console for one of the generations - Wii/PS3/Xbox360. As pointed out by another poster, the PowerPC variant used to be in apple hardware too.

Variations of standard Power chips are also what runs IBM's mainframes. For quite a long time they beat Intel in raw performance on some benchmarks. The problem is it was 10x the price.

The workstations and servers were always crazy expensive compared to x86 hardware and that's one reason they remained pretty niche.

Within IBM, Power systems were most frequently used to run IBM's Unix - AIX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Power_microprocessors

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#37

Post by AlbertoGP »

huks wrote: post #18

My experience using Voidlinux, on a Raptor POWER9 system, has been excellent. The software support has just gotten better and better. It would be a shame to lose this momentum. Affordability and availability are major pain points. I've shared my excitement about OpenPOWER with many and their excitement evaporates when they are told what a modest system costs. I am strong believer in FOSS and fully open owner controll…

My main workstation is too a Raptor Power9 running Void since November 2019, and I’m very happy with it although as the article mentions, “My experience with firmware is that open source does not mean necessarily better, rather the opposite”. OpenBMC (the firmware for the little ARM-based embedded computer that boots the big one) has a number of rough edges.

From time to time I submit patches to software to make it work (or work better) on this machine, last week it was these two trivial ones:

https://github.com/ciao-lang/ciao/pull/45

https://github.com/janet-lang/janet/pull/915

Typically that’s all that’s needed, in some cases it’s just more of it:

https://github.com/oneapi-src/oneDNN/pull/767

But for most things, since it’s Linux, it’s just those small changes: (one of my customers runs the software I write on AIX and that’s a little more work)

https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/pull/5586

https://sourceforge.net/p/speed-dreams/tickets/1022/

For Rust programs, many packages used i8 for C strings (to interface with OpenGL for instance) which broke when running on ppc64 and had to be changed to c_char, but that’s not a problem these days, I guess because many people now test on ARM.

https://github.com/femtovg/femtovg/pull/5

Before Power10 was done, IBM actually asked us Raptor users about proposals for useful machine code instructions to add to it. I replied that I’d like to have hardware UTF-8 de-/encoding but they wanted a more detailed proposal and I never got around to write it. I’m not even sure that this would be worthwhile, but I see UTF-8 de-/encoding everywhere in the code I write and would like it to approach memory read/write speeds.

I was very disappointed to learn that they had gone more proprietary with Power10 so I would not have been able to use those instructions anyway. What a pity! This machine still covers my needs so I’m not planning to replace it any time soon.

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#38

Post by DannyBee »

ballen wrote: post #7
h2odragon wrote: post #2

If i had a "different" ISA to market, I'd think the very first priority would be to have excellent free compilers for it, be they FOSS or not. Write our own and give them away if we gotta. Remove every barrier to people using your product that you can. IBM doesn't think that way. They're probably using "the longhair hippies can't use this hardware" as a selling point.

The IBM XL compilers have had a free to download community version for a little while now [1]. They also appear to be adopting LLVM [2]. 1. https://www.ibm.com/products/xl-cpp-linux-compiler-power 2. https://community.ibm.com/community/user/power/blogs/si-yuan...

In some ways, #2 is sad to me. Don't get me wrong, I have worked a ton on LLVM and love it.

But at least when i was there, IBM's interprocedural middle-end (TPO) was some of the nicest and well structured C++ compiler code i had seen in a long time. It was well written, well commented, and well architected.

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#39

Post by classichasclass »

huks wrote: post #18

My experience using Voidlinux, on a Raptor POWER9 system, has been excellent. The software support has just gotten better and better. It would be a shame to lose this momentum. Affordability and availability are major pain points. I've shared my excitement about OpenPOWER with many and their excitement evaporates when they are told what a modest system costs. I am strong believer in FOSS and fully open owner controll…

Fedora on POWER9 for my daily driver, personally (a dual-8 Raptor Talos II). I like the architecture, having been an AIX admin since the 3.2.5 days (still have a personal POWER6 with it) and a long time Power Mac bigot, and I like Raptor's commitment to openness. My HTPC is a Blackbird.

It shouldn't be a privilege to own a fully user-auditable computer. Cost continues to be a problem, which is why I hope Microwatt gets into more things. But the cost is primarily from the motherboard, which has no economies of scale (CPU prices are actually fairly competitive), and other than the processor everything else is off-the-shelf. Fedora, Void and FreeBSD work well in my personal experience, and there are other choices.

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#40

Post by classichasclass »

AlbertoGP wrote: post #37
huks wrote: post #18

My experience using Voidlinux, on a Raptor POWER9 system, has been excellent. The software support has just gotten better and better. It would be a shame to lose this momentum. Affordability and availability are major pain points. I've shared my excitement about OpenPOWER with many and their excitement evaporates when they are told what a modest system costs. I am strong believer in FOSS and fully open owner controll…

My main workstation is too a Raptor Power9 running Void since November 2019, and I’m very happy with it although as the article mentions, “My experience with firmware is that open source does not mean necessarily better, rather the opposite”. OpenBMC (the firmware for the little ARM-based embedded computer that boots the big one) has a number of rough edges. From time to time I submit patches to software to make it w…

Interesting, never heard about them asking about ISA changes. Where was that done?

There are some lovely new instructions in Power10 but until they get the firmware source out fully I won't use them in the Firefox JIT.

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