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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

#11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To ask the dumb question, what is source hut? It looks essentially like Gitlab to me.

Not a dumb question. https://sourcehut.org should tell you what you need to know. If you have any specific questions, I can answer them.

Hello!

I went through that website before posting. That's why I thought it was a Gitlab-like service. I like that it works without JavaScript, and it appears to have a wiki-like integration too.

It looks like a neat service.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#12
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To ask the dumb question, what is source hut? It looks essentially like Gitlab to me.

It can do the same tasks like Gitlab (Git hosting, issue tracking, CI and more) but it does it in a different way that is more similar to the workflow of the Linux kernel and other big open source projects. For example instead of pull requests, you have mailing lists in which you send patches. You can see more in the website of Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org

Ahh, makes sense. Thanks!

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#13

> I am quite impressed with it so far. Installation was a breeze, it compiles the kernel on 32 cores from spinning rust in 4m15s Does anyone know how this compares to a recent x86 machine? This seems quite fast for the entire kernel, but I have no idea what typical build times are like.

2m3.673s; default config with loadable modules disabled; make -m 32. This is on a second-last generation 24C/48T Xeon (albeit a slower one) with all of the known speculative execution vulnerabilities mitigated except spec_store_bypass, and SMT still enabled (because htop is prettier with more pretend CPUs).

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#14
post #13

> I am quite impressed with it so far. Installation was a breeze, it compiles the kernel on 32 cores from spinning rust in 4m15s Does anyone know how this compares to a recent x86 machine? This seems quite fast for the entire kernel, but I have no idea what typical build times are like.

2m3.673s; default config with loadable modules disabled; make -m 32. This is on a second-last generation 24C/48T Xeon (albeit a slower one) with all of the known speculative execution vulnerabilities mitigated except spec_store_bypass, and SMT still enabled (because htop is prettier with more pretend CPUs).

What's the I/O situation? I did my build from an HDD, WD Blue. Also, kernel config matters a lot - I used yesterday's master branch from Linus, with Alpine Linux 3.10's ppc64le config, plus olddefconfig to catch it up.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#15

> I am quite impressed with it so far. Installation was a breeze, it compiles the kernel on 32 cores from spinning rust in 4m15s Does anyone know how this compares to a recent x86 machine? This seems quite fast for the entire kernel, but I have no idea what typical build times are like.

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...

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#16

> I am quite impressed with it so far. Installation was a breeze, it compiles the kernel on 32 cores from spinning rust in 4m15s Does anyone know how this compares to a recent x86 machine? This seems quite fast for the entire kernel, but I have no idea what typical build times are like.

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 agree, but I’m really curious if this is just because the commonly used compilers & libraries aren’t particularly optimised for ppc64le (which is a guess) or whether the hardware itself cannot match the equivalent Xeon and Ryzen offerings

Not that this matters to the end user, but it is still interesting IMO

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#18
> I have christened it “flandre”3, which I think is fitting.

Youmu Konpaku is best character. Just gotta love the sword-characters in a bullet-game. Although Flandre was an "extra" endgame boss character, never actually playable IIRC. Really good music for her stage though.

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Glad to hear everything is working out for your machine. One thing I'm curious about:

> Installation was a breeze, it compiles the kernel on 32 cores from spinning rust in 4m15s

Is that 8-core / 32-thread CPU? I don't think there's actually a 32-real core CPU available from them. If so, I think that's an impressive speed for 8-real cores.

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#19

> I am quite impressed with it so far. Installation was a breeze, it compiles the kernel on 32 cores from spinning rust in 4m15s Does anyone know how this compares to a recent x86 machine? This seems quite fast for the entire kernel, but I have no idea what typical build times are like.

It'll depend on the kernel configuration. I don't know about the Raptor, however I have some experience with IBM's POWER9 servers and they do have tremendous single thread performance and many cores, and are quite a bit faster than Intel Xeons (although at a considerably higher price, but the customers usually need the performance and aren't too sensitive about price).

Re: RaptorCS's redemption: the POWER9 machine works

#20

> I am quite impressed with it so far. Installation was a breeze, it compiles the kernel on 32 cores from spinning rust in 4m15s Does anyone know how this compares to a recent x86 machine? This seems quite fast for the entire kernel, but I have no idea what typical build times are like.

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that Sir_Cmpwn meant 32 threads, not 32 cores. Raptor sells an 8-core CPU bundle, and those cores are SMT4 capable, meaning 4 threads per core. So it will appear as 32 CPUs if you run `htop` or `cat /proc/cpuinfo` in Linux.

Raptor does sell a 22-core SMT4 capable CPU, which, Yikes! that's a lot of computing power.

That Blackbird bundle seems like a beast. The Phoronix benchmarks show it outperformed by high end x86 chips though. I wonder if some of that comes down to gcc optimizations because x86 has been around longer.

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