Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
Thanks for the answer! On 03/21/23 Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: Would a live BE<->LE translation be so different? I thin so, yes. So it would seem. I get it now, it would have a very deep impact on performance. I'd rather have a slower but working emulated LE system than a in theory faster BE system with constant problems, like the one mentioned in Firefox.[5] The one you link to in Firefox is not linked to little-endian vs big-endian. In my understanding it happens on Power in little endian mode, too. True. I was thinking about my own Power Mac G5 that I used to try get Gentoo Linux running on some years back. Compared to my x86 computers it is a constant struggle! I don't think I've ever had so many regressions between kernel and software updates than with this big endian machine. I had them with Firefox, which didn't build. The problem got fixed back than, but it was related to the different endianness. If you look at comments about BE, you'll see that this is a problem. There are examples everywhere.[1][2][3] What does work, is using an older or non-cutting-edge distribution, because it isn't that simple anymore to just "keep it rolling" like it used to be. I used Gentoo Linux on my Power Mac G4 and G5 about 10 years+ back. It worked. Compared to now, it was still more of a reporting job than x86. And bear in mind that I'm just a desktop user guy. In lack of another word I'd call myself a "power user", in the sense that I use a rather complicated distribution such as Gentoo and that I regularly report issues I have while my primary objective is to use my computer as a desktop system - as a use, not as a developer. I cannot write core or solve complicated compilation errors. But I can report them. My two Power Mac G5s sit in the cellar waiting for me to put Gentoo on them. I also tried Debian, but I was stuck due to a fatal decision to use Btrfs and thus I'm stuck with the pagesize of the initial kernel I used if I don't want to reformat the drives; which I don't want. So additional to big endian problems, PPC64BE also has a problem with different software requiring different pagesizes (4k vs. 64k).[4] One of my Power Macs has a Radeon card, the other an Nvidia card. But in the end both had considerable problems. Back in 2017/18/19, when I worked on them, I couldn't even compile KDE Plasma Desktop properly because PPC64BE was (temporarily) dropped. I think it's back in business now, but comparing the available software to the one I'm using on my x86 laptop and desktop, I would have to invest considerably more time to get the software up and running. Of course I could always use a proven PPC64BE distribution, but most of them include less software, also have constant issues with packages suddenly dropping out due to failure to compile, and so on. In the end I would end up with an older system, that somehow works, but always has issues. Hence my opinion/my observation, that PPC32BE and PPC64BE are not well supported on Linux anymore. That said, I would love to have a truely open Linux system that is as performant and as supported as non-free x86 systems are today. But, frankly, I don't see it. Prove me wrong! My Lenovo Legion 5 with state-of-the-art performance (AMD Zen 3, integrated Radeon graphics for Linux - which is accelerated enough for my Linux desktop use case, while it also has an Nvidia graphics card for gaming on Windows; and it would provide the same on Linux if I were to use the proprietary drivers, which I don't, while nouveau doesn't support it yet). It did cost around 1800$. If there were to come a similar system, truly open, for Linux only (so no Windows gaming), and thus without the extra graphics (which I no have from the dedicated Nvidia card), but with fully open firmware, it would then only depend on the "feeling" I get for this laptop. A great ThinkPad-like keyboard is a requirement for me, as well as the feeling of quality (it shouldn't bend and it shouldn't give the impression of cheap plastic). If it then has great performance (like, multiple cores and en-par with current x86 CPUs, as well as reasonably accelerated graphics, at least en-par with current Intel IGPs), I personally will have no problem to pay the same price or a little bit more for less performance (no gaming capable graphics card, a tiny bit less overall performance from the CPU/GPU), but fully open sourced, meaning no hidden functions (like Intels SSM) or closed firmware (like UEFI, TPM etc.). Likewise, such a desktop motherboard adhering to standards (ATX, periphery such as CPU and DIMM sockets and SATA/NVMe/PCIe/USB etc.) at a reasonable price (not like the Raptor II) I'd already have bought. Such mainboards cost around 200 to 800 $, the CPU is on a socket so it can later be upgraded, as well as DIMM sockets for the memory. If it were a truly open source system - in terms of firmware, IMHO the CPU can be proprietary as long as it doesn't have closed functions (x86 SMM) - I'd be willing
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On 03/22/23 Paul Wise wrote: I was under the impression that POWER CPUs do *both* BE and LE at the same time, with each process able to start in either BE or LE mode. Perhaps thats a feature of IBM POWER CPUs and not NXP ones though? I only know that POWER started to be LE since the POWER8. PowerPCs (PPC32) used to have an LE mode, but not the PowerPC G5 aka PowerPC 970, which is probably the most famous PPC64 (PPC64BE) system due to the Power Mac G5, next to the Cell from the PlayStation 3.
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On 03/22/23 Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: I was looking at those projects in the past, but there are two problems: 1. They are way too expensive in terms of a performance to price ratio. 2. They are getting way too less support to make that extra investment worthwhile. you just neatly summarised the entire problem with the Power community which was what inspired IBM to buy Redhat, in their very special way they thought would solve the problem, bless 'em. IMHO the Linux and/or open source community is missing out on providing a competitive truly open system for its users and fans. I'm sure that quite a few Linux and/or BSD people worldwide would buy a system with free and open firmware, that is usable also for the average "power user", meaning it would have to have some "unbrick/reset" capability for misflashed firmware. Would a live BE<->LE translation be so different? I'd rather have a slower but working emulated LE system than a in theory faster BE system with constant problems, like the one mentioned in Firefox.[5] it will be absolute hell. like a *thousand* times or possibly even four orders of magnitude slower. Thanks for the explanation. at which point you're genuinely better off just running qemu, even on a Power system. Yes, and that's not an option. I regret that more and more developers are dropping support for those alternative systems (Itanium was just dropped recently, or it was discussed with leaning towards letting it go). This is also true for Big Endian (PPC64BE). On the other hand, I don't really see performant and cheap (for desktop systems) systems on the market that aren't mainstream x86 (Intel and AMD). Letting those now older alternatives go (that were mostly servers to begin with) is probably a reasonable decision. But also sad...
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On Wednesday, March 22, 2023, Linux User #330250 wrote: > On the other hand, I don't really see performant and cheap (for desktop > systems) systems on the market that aren't mainstream x86 (Intel and > AMD). Letting those now older alternatives go (that were mostly servers > to begin with) is probably a reasonable decision. But also sad... thus we (RED, Libre-SOC) are "on the clock" with a limited window of opportunity to stop that from happening. there are additional complications: IBM signed a non-compete agreement over 12 years ago with Motorola to stay out of the desktop market and then the *entire Motorola team* was killed when that Malay Air passenger plane was shot down. an additional complication is that VSX is so insane (950 instructions) that to even attempt adding it to a very first SoC by a team that has never done HDL before would be, frankly, flat-out stupid. thus we made the very easy decision to cut it, and i would dearly love VSX, more specifically its PackedSIMD instructions, to be buried and a small tactical nuke to be dropped on them. https://www.sigarch.org/simd-instructions-considered-harmful/ that leaves us with "only" 214 instructions as part of the SFFS Compliancy Level to implement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA#Compliancy now, as part of the effort to fix the issues caused by developers (even those in IBM!) assuming that IBM's products are the world's only relevant Power ISA implementations, we've begun an initiative funded by NLnet to create a debian and gentoo SFFS port. very interestingly it will also run (with some v2.06->3.0 instruction trap emulation) on the E5500 which is a very unusual 64-bit Power ISA CPU from Motorola (Quorl family) https://bugs.libre-soc.org/show_bug.cgi?id=999 SFFS will also be ideally suited to Microwatt, A2O, A2I, as well as Libre-SOC, all of which run in FPGAs and there are qemu options to drop down to SFFS (killing altivec and vsx). all of this needs active interest, active help, and people to take responsibility for solving these issues instead of leaving it to large Corporates whom we know, from long and bitter experience, are just never going to get it: they always always take the easiest route to market. License PowerVR. license an HDMI solution from your competitor (Intel) and forget to obtain a license for the firmware source code such that all your products (AMD) since 2013 require a proprietary blob just to start the HDMI interface. easy, right? if there's interest in helping out we do have NLnet and other NGI funding. l. -- --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On 03/22/23 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: thus we (RED, Libre-SOC) are "on the clock" with a limited window of opportunity to stop that from happening. You mean devs dropping certain architectures? IMHO when there are no systems in numbers on the market, support is going to be like those numbers. And I'm thinking both a) numbers in sold units as in b) money made (i.e. expensive systems, less sold). Why did the Raspberry Pi get so much support, why is everything so well developed for it? Numbers... Why are expensive server systems well supported? Because they are expensive... But, for the purpose of "Linux on the deskop" the former (large numbers as in sold units) would be preferred, because it means more developers in the (free) community, thus more software ported and hopefully everything runs (like we see on the RaspPi). there are additional complications: IBM signed a non-compete agreement over 12 years ago with Motorola to stay out of the desktop market and then the *entire Motorola team* was killed when that Malay Air passenger plane was shot down. Well, I'm not surprised, considering that it's IBM we're talking about. It's this firm that by accident created the PC platform, was then caught unprepared and surprised by its own success and lost the whole marked share in the process... Sorry to hear the Motorola story. Didn't know... now, as part of the effort to fix the issues caused by developers I'm just a user. I don't develop. I bought the Steam Deck because I like gaming and I'm fascinated by the idea to have a portable Linux desktop computer in my hands that is in some regard equally capable as my Windows desktop, while being portable. This is great! I had to have it, even though I'm not a handheld gamer. I prefer keyboard and mouse, and, let's face it, that would pervert the idea of the Steam Deck. But I also got the dock, so I could use it as my desktop replacement. I'm impressed at a) the price, b) the performance (which is almost as good as my ~2000$ desktop system), and c) about the fact that Valve decided to use Arch Linux. Arch is pretty bad-ass (like Gentoo). So, that said: I really don't care about the details. VSX? Yeah, heard of it. 950 instructions? And there I was thinking RISC means "reduced"... FGPA? Heard of it, but don't know what to do with it. When competitive alternative open Linux hardware is presented, whether it will be Power/PowerPC, RISC-V, Arm or whatever (I really don't care), that is very very well supported in Linux, for the desktop (!), I will be among the first ones to buy it. Just like the Steam Deck. For the openness (freely available firmware, including the possibility to modify the source code yourself) I'd be happy to pay the extra Dollars... (My desktop with a gaming graphics card did cost around 2000$, excluding keyboard/mouse and display. If it were open, I'd be happy to pay 3000 $, but if that also means that Linux has problems here and there, why should I? A higher price doesn't help when software doesn't actually run...) As long as my laptops and desktops are way better of with closed firmware blobs here and there, I'll have to take that (bitter) pill. For one very pragmatic reason: Linux and the software I use simply works.
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
Hi, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: > Thanks for the link, interesting and I didn't know about this one > indeed. Beyond "not available this year", I see the one-but least FAQ > https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/faq/ > says that it won't run a "modern distro" in little-endian mode, as > "although it does support LE, modern distros require some > functionality that are not available to this CPU". > > And Debian's only 64 bit Power port seems to be... little endian? Big > endian is not even listed on https://www.debian.org/ports/ as being in > progress, it is not there at all. the laptop should run in BigEndian mode. We already run Debian on the NXP development board. Debian powerpc tuns on both my PowerBook G4 in 32bit as on my iMac G5 ... so while it is unstable, they don't know that page lists them as debian discontinued. Most software is available,but YMMV, especially on the browser side. Browsers are an amass of layers and libraries and for certains there is high resistance on portability support (e.g. SKIA). Sadly, programmers are lazy and Big Endian support is fading away, as newer generations don't have the culture of the golden age of computing, accustomed to Intel and ARM only. Usually nothing is unfixable, however certain things are pretty complicated. Riccardo
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
Hi, Didier Kryn wrote: > Another concern is that a software which does run only on one single > endianness proves to be buggy and loosely written. High level software > such as Firefox should be independant of such considerations, exactly as > it should not rely on internal details of the implementation of > libraries, the libc in the first place. In this respect, the revival of > Linux on BE arches -- together with libcs alternative to glibc -- would > be a big service to the Linux ecosystem. That's the theory. Practice is different. E.g. if you use GNUstep, an OpenStep/Cocoa reimplementation which has multiplatform in by design, your life is happy. Most endianness problems are solved inside, so if you write an application in it, it will be cross-platform, except if you wrote some low-level code code with graphics, network byte swapping or such. You could still have issues, as certain code (e.g. shifts, swaps, casts, signed/unsigned issues) works in one endiannes and not the other or vice-versa. something like a browser, however, is a mess. It handles a lot of stuff wuite low-level, graphics layers, GL, sound, countless image and video codec libraries. Plus JS script support for your specific CPU. Just look at TenFourFox and the various bug reports and patches Cameron proposed to mozilla which sometimes got accepted, sometimes ignored. Most noticeably SKIA noit being interested in BE at all, as well as issues with Cairo. I am working on the ArcticFox browser and try to import most of these fixes ftom TenFourFox to make them available on a browser not limited to Mac. But it is a pain and a pity to know "upstream" is diverging more and more. Currently, ArcticFox has only minor issues compared on PPC to itself built on Intel or ARM. Help appreciated. For me, the only real endiannes is Big-Endian, as were many classic CPUs, Motorola 68k, classic MIPS, PPC, SPARC, HP-PA. I hoped Risc-V would be... and think that PPC-le is betrayal like MIPS-le. Like a BE VAX would have been betrayal! But this is personal. Cheers, Riccardo
