Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

peter.czanik.hu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 75 posts

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#51

Post by p_l »

marcodiego wrote: post #26
detaro wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that RYF is entirely useless, just that "new version requires firmware blobs, old one didn't" is a clearer and stronger statement than mentioning RYF IMHO.

Hmmm... I understand. I mentioned ryf certification because Tallos II and Talos II Lite are the only ryf-certified modern systems available. Also, I bet FSF is very strict when certifying systems so we don't have to rely on the word of the vendor only.

POWER10 could probably game RYF certification. Raptor is really much stricter than everyone on that topic. If you make bits of firmware non-upgradeable, I believe you can pass them as RYF-certified even if they are blobs - they are counted as part of the hardware.

Raptor didn't accept anything like that, closest is the minimal (it's a RISC after all) microcode mask rom in POWER9 core that AFAIK is effectively covering some hairy and rarely used instructions as multiple standard Power instructions. And it's so small thing that I am not really sure it's there...

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#52

Post by chithanh »

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…

Warning: rant (sorta)

I remember discussing with an IBM representative at one of the last CeBIT shows (was it 2016?) that the community who did open source development on non-x86 were gravitating away from POWER/PowerPC towards ARM. The affordable hardware was a major selling point.

His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud. But that is of course not interesting for someone who runs a home lab and works on Linux distros.

And even so, the blog post still does not aim to where they need to aim. Raptor systems are far from "affordable" for your average CS undergraduate or hobbyist. Power Pi's $250 target price is still off by almost an order of magnitude. The $250+ market is served by second-hand POWER servers, which are ok for home labs. Unfortunately, Ubuntu and IBM in their infinite wisdom decided to drop POWER8 support from upcoming releases, which will drive away home labs and the open source community further from Power.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-2...

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#53

Post by nix23 »

chithanh wrote: post #52
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…

Warning: rant (sorta) I remember discussing with an IBM representative at one of the last CeBIT shows (was it 2016?) that the community who did open source development on non-x86 were gravitating away from POWER/PowerPC towards ARM. The affordable hardware was a major selling point. His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud. But that is of course not interesting for someone who runs a…

>His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud.

Yeah the mainframe community asked ibm to open some newer systems >24bit but ibm told them they want to provide the community with new "actual" software...out of that came that stupid program called "master the mainframe" or "IBM Z Xplore" it's unbelievable that they are so tone-deaf even to the most loyal IBM fans...IBM is the perfect example of a marketing/management and anti-engineer company (as of today), they really deserve to have a slow death.

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#54

Post by fsflover »

Jasper_ wrote: post #19
unixhero wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reference to the ryf certification?

They're referring to the FSF's "Respects Your Freedoms" programme, a frankly absurd specification that encourages vendors to lock down closed source firmware into ROM rather than actually make it free. RYF doesn't care about the hardware designs themselves being open (no computer would qualify in that case), so they treat closed-source firmware ROM images as identical to closed-source hardware, which is fine. But sto…

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

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#55

Post by Lammy »

> "Old Macs are big-endian, just as network processors from NXP. Some Power developers still want big-endian systems to keep the dream alive. But support for big-endian systems is mostly gone from Linux distributions, and when it comes to developing common utilities or even programming languages, most developers are no more even aware that a world exists outside of little-endian. As much as I love the PowerPC laptop project, I see it now as a dead end: producing hardware for an ever shrinking software ecosystem."

Note that PowerPC itself is bi-endian and always has been since the PPC601, configurable via a special register. POWER gained this capability in POWER3 when it subsumed the PowerPC ISA. Old PowerPC Macs are explicitly big-endian because they needed to maintain compatibility with everything written for the earlier MC680x0-based Macs whose CPUs were big-endian-only. Windows NT ran on PowerPC in little-endian mode!

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~meesh/cmsc411/website/projects/outer...

https://catfox.life/2018/11/03/clearing-confusion-regarding-...

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#56

Post by berlinquin »

classichasclass wrote: post #39
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 ge…

Unrelated, but thank you for your blog! I check in occasionally, mostly looking for a reason to justify buying one of the Raptor machines at work. I really enjoy the articles on qemu/virtualization.

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#57

Post by berlinquin »

mkj wrote: post #13

At the other end of the scale, if anyone wants to play you can run a little openpower CPU on an FPGA with completely open source. https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt It's capable of running Linux, some example docs are https://shenki.github.io/boot-linux-on-microwatt/ The toolchain consists of "apt install gcc-powerpc64le-linux-gnu" on Debian, no funny downloads. And if you want to target a Lattice ECP5 board…

Thanks for sharing. I've looked at getting a PowerPC dev board, but didn't find anything at a reasonable price. I never made the connection that microwatt plus and FPGA would get me there.

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#58

Post by gnufx »

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…

I don't manage the system I work on, so I don't see OpenBMC, but "a number of rough edges" sounds a lot better than the proprietary BMCs it's been my misfortune to use, which appear basically to be unsupported.

As far as rust goes, I've just asked around for rust expertise to try to get a feel for whether it's worth persisting with trying to make the stuff work that a user wants, since I know nothing about it. (The first issue I found was exactly i8 in a current crate.) That is rather the exception in building free software for ppc64le, though, in my experience of packaging HPC-type stuff. The real problems are with Mellanox/NVIDIA proprietary stuff for GPU support.

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#59

Post by gnufx »

AlbertoGP wrote: post #47
classichasclass wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. Which channel specifically? VSX is really where the new development is happening, but it's become quite complete. The PC-direct instructions first made available in P9 also really closed a gap (beforehand you had to do bl with a weird flag to get PC in LR without trashing the history table).

The IRC channel was #talos-workstation on FreeNet, now on Libera.Chat. Do you know of some minimal example of calling VSX instructions from C? Ideally just one .c file and one Makefile or README with the exact GCC command to compile it, plus a pointer to documentation describing each instruction. I’ve seen assembler inserted into C source code with GCC, but I’ve never done it and I assume there are some non-obvious d…

I don't know what you want of the VSX, but if you want vectorized code, what do you expect to gain over letting the compiler do it on your C? If you want an example, there's the kernels in OpnBLAS and FFTW (and BLIS, but that seems to be broken on POWER9).

There's an IBM web page somewhere with three(?) alternatives for using VSX, one of which is just using SSE intrinsics -- I don't know how well that works -- and another is a library that's now in Fedora, whose name I forget.

That said, it's obviously not competitive with AVX2 or, presumably SVE, unless you can win on parallelization (or plain clock speed, which you probably can't).

Re: Keeping POWER relevant in the open source world

#60

Post by gnufx »

andrewf wrote: post #49

At least Linux POWER can go little endian! Being big endian seems pretty lonely in 2022 - AIX, Solaris and stuff on System Z? https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/b...

I counted other big endian processors (probably looking at GCC support) a while ago, but I don't remember what they were, and probably only embedded processors.
Post reply on HN