Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On 03/23/23 Riccardo Mottola wrote: 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. Thanks for ArcticFox! I personally have never used it, I'm using the Gentoo ebuild for Firefox which is most likely a bit different to Mozilla's Firefox, but close. On my Macs, under (long unsupported) Mac OS X, I always used TenFourFox and I'm very very grateful to Cameron Kaiser that he kept it available. I also see BE disappearing from lots and lots of software. My assumption is that it simply isn't viable anymore, as most users and developers have moved on. Even IBM moved on, POWER now is LE. So, I guess, most developers don't want to spend their time fixing stuff for their one test machine and those five other guys who still run it on BE machines as a hobby... I get that. So, the solution would be, to reintroduce BE in big numbers. How? Well, like the Chromebooks! Make cheap but relatively performant hardware in big numbers and sell them to Linuxers. There need to be two things present: 1) Fully open source firmware and full Linux support. 2) Cheap(er than stuff like the old ThinkPads with libreboot or stuff like the Raptor II), and in large numbers. 3) Easily usable for simple users, yet customizable enough for developers. Examples: the Raspberry Pi, the Steam Deck, the Chromebooks. Price is key. As is Linux support and openness. If such a hardware were to become available, in different variations (light laptops as well as heavily customizable heavier ones, and different desktop boards to choose from), different price ranges and great firmware/Linux support, I'm quite certain that every Linux user worldwide would consider getting such a device, even if it were the cheapest version. But what you'd get would be /numbers/ of users, and with it the power to have developers care more. If necessary, make cooperations. IBM. Valve. I don't know, and I don't care. But, if someone with the power to create such a thing is listening: get it going. And get the Linux community behind you: If Linus Torvalds were to say, he got rid of his Chromebook in favour of the new Linux laptop -- specifically for the FOSS Linux community -- people will listen. But, again: price is key! p.s. Sorry for hijacking your post. But if TenFourFox showed something, than it's this: no devices -> no users -> no developers.
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On Thu, 2023-03-23 at 10:41 +0100, Linux User #330250 wrote: > I also see BE disappearing from lots and lots of software. My assumption > is that it simply isn't viable anymore, as most users and developers > have moved on. Even IBM moved on, POWER now is LE. So, I guess, most > developers don't want to spend their time fixing stuff for their one > test machine and those five other guys who still run it on BE machines > as a hobby... Both Linux/s390x and AIX/PPC are still big-endian and will remain so for the foreseeable future. IBM makes good money with these, so don't hold your breath about big-endian going away. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `-GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On Tue, 2023-03-21 at 00:16 +0100, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: > Would a Power-based machine in general, and a Raptor Blackbird in > particular, be a good freedom-respecting computer to run a Debian > desktop? I personally gave up my similar idea of using my Raptor Blackbird Power9 as full desktop replacement due to many reasons (mainly due to - not quite unexpected - non-working software I could not replace or run in an emulator/VM or that uses proprietary x86 blobs/binaries/firmware). A quite comprehensive overview over working software was published by the maintainer of void linux so you could check this against your software requirements: https://repo.voidlinux-ppc.org/stats.html Note that this list may be old since the maintainer of void linux has started a new distro called "Chimera Linux": https://voidlinux-ppc.org/news/2022/09/repo-update.html https://chimera-linux.org/
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
Le 23/03/2023 à 00:43, Riccardo Mottola a écrit :
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.
Yes, always (~:
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.
That's the point. casts and swaps should be encapsulated in very
low-level routines. They are overused, by facility il places they should
not. The C language implements implicit type conversion and the compiler
can handle safely sign issues; the programmer should keep her/his hands
off of it; it is a question of discipline. There is, unfortunately a
culture of terse programming in C which goes against safety.
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.
I understand that a browser is a gnu ("a big animal", as the LaTeX
manual stands). But, the very low-level graphics components should,
ideally, be encapsulated. Dunno how JS works; I'm not considering myself
a great programmer (~:
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.
I can assure you of my admiration for such a work. And my thanks.
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.
I have also very much progrmmed for BE during my carreer, M6809,
M68k and PPC; done much low-level VME also. all in C. Around the end, I
had a rather big and complex project (with respect to my skills), with 4
persons involved. We made a cultural revolution: made a review of what
language would be best and chose one which was neither C/C++ nor Java.
The result was excellent: high performance, good readability and 99%
bugs detected at compile time. The language you speak decides in part
the way you think; and this is true also for programing languages and
you learn a lot when you learn a new language; I'm sure we could not
have reached such a result in ~ 3 years, with our original culture of
C/C++ programmers.
I remember a discussion about which of LE and BE was natural, maybe
it was on this list. This purely a question of taste (~:
Never used a MacIntosh, but very many single board computers which
had the cpus mentionned above. Nowadays my laptop has an amd64, like
everybody. But I would be ready to pay more for a ppc or a riscv.
Cheers, and many thanks for your work.
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On Thursday, March 23, 2023, Linux User #330250 wrote: > I also see BE disappearing from lots and lots of software. My assumption > is that it simply isn't viable anymore, as most users and developers > have moved on. except in Japan, India, China, and anywhere else in the world where the main CPU directly memory-map accesses the Peripheral Bus (Industrial Control), and router hardware used literally everywhere in the entire world because IP Protocol network-order *IS* big-endian. you have fallen as have the very software communities you quote into the trap of assuming "desktop [and HPC]" === "ALL software worldwide". because java. because javascript. if anyone tried proposing on openwrt mailing lists that they should convert to using javascript for all source code there would be nobody to reply because they would all be in shock and disbelief. [openwrt runs on systems with clock rates between 60 mhz and 600 mhz approx. JS would punish that with a 10x slowdown] i am exaggerating to get the point across but you get the general gist i am sure, that there exists a real serious problem inherent in the "Bazaar" model that we have all *assumed* to be inviolate and 100% successful in all circumstances. unfortunately it is not, and the loss of BE support because "why would desktop need it??" illustrates that perfectly. talk to anyone doing network-centric distros and they will not be happy, explaining in great detail how performance and critical latency are really severely impacted on LE-centric hardware. there are even companies doing custom FPGA Products to bi-directionally *REORDER* IP protocol Packets "because bloody Intel bloody LE"! 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 Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 03:10:55PM +0100, Private Power9 Hardware Donation wrote: > On Tue, 2023-03-21 at 00:16 +0100, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: >> Would a Power-based machine in general, and a Raptor Blackbird in >> particular, be a good freedom-respecting computer to run a Debian >> desktop? > I personally gave up my similar idea of using my Raptor Blackbird > Power9 as full desktop replacement (...) > A quite comprehensive overview over working software was published > by the maintainer of void linux > https://repo.voidlinux-ppc.org/stats.html I find that list quite encouraging. The only red things I recognise and could use (and do use...) are: * signal - seems to really be a porting difficulty... barely supports arm64, and only due to Apple MacOS X switching to it... * texlive-bin - ??? TeX is really really very portable, so I expect this is distro-specific problem; in Debian texlive-binaries is up-to-date on long list of architectures including ppc64el and ppc64 * xfsdump - distro-specific problem? Seems OK on Debian on long list of architectures, including ppc64el and ppc64. Other stuff i: * heavily non-free software... faaar out of my radar, like opera, skype (that still exists even???), slack, steam, zoom * x86 specific stuff: lilo, seabios, tp_smapi, vbetool, wine, syslinux * things that are by nature attached to low-level system stuff, and need to be ported to each arch individually: virtualbox, xen (that's a loss, but I knew about that and the plan is to switch to kvm)
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 06:30:53PM +0100, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: > On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 03:10:55PM +0100, Private Power9 Hardware Donation > wrote: >> I personally gave up my similar idea of using my Raptor Blackbird >> Power9 as full desktop replacement (...) >> A quite comprehensive overview over working software was published >> by the maintainer of void linux >> https://repo.voidlinux-ppc.org/stats.html > I find that list quite encouraging. The only red things I recognise > (...) > Other stuff i (*** correction: recognise ***): I also forgot to list musl which I recognised, but OK, I'll run a glibc-based system such as Debian... I can live without musl, but all the while in the abstract kudos and better if it runs on more architectures.
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On 03/23/23 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: you have fallen as have the very software communities you quote into the trap of assuming "desktop [and HPC]" === "ALL software worldwide". unfortunately it is not, and the loss of BE support because "why would desktop need it??" illustrates that perfectly. talk to anyone doing network-centric distros and they will not be happy, explaining in great detail how performance and critical latency are really severely impacted on LE-centric hardware. there are even companies doing custom FPGA Products to bi-directionally *REORDER* IP protocol Packets "because bloody Intel bloody LE"! Thanks. I get that. I love diversity and I loved the possibility to choose and be different. But if I want to continue to use Gentoo Linux on my systems, and I run into compile errors all the time (due to rolling releases) and can't even use the just released kernel because "this one has issues on PPC64, use an older [tested] one...", then this is the reality I live in. While it definitely is my hobby to use Gentoo Linux on my main and Debian on most of my other machines (and I plan to try Arch), it's also true that I actually want to use the machine as a desktop. With amd64 I can do that, like I could in the past on Apple's Power Macs. But not anymore. Bloody who now? I don't know, I just know that it is how it is. I could always use my now about 20 year old Power Mac G5 as a server of some kind for IP protocol stuff. But that would be a real mess: it uses up around 130 watts just for running idle. Every modern LE system would outperform it while using up way less power. And while the Power Mac G5's main objective is to heat up the room while running, mine is to use it on occasion as a simple desktop system, because burning some hundreds of watts for fun is the very definition of a hobby. Just like when I'm gaming on my Windows PC... The real issue here, for me as a Linux user with the history I layed out already, is to get any non-Intel system really, that is something will supported on Linux, and that is free from the firmware up, while still being affordable. In short: usable as a Linux desktop system. I've been looking for a Linux PC (desktop and laptop) for years. Apple only makes computers for themselves, now more so than in the past. PCs are almost 100% Windows systems, with the product key embedded in the firmware and everything being specific to Microsoft and its Windows, plain to see when my Linux boots up with the message: [4.262935] ACPI: [Firmware Bug]: BIOS _OSI(Linux) query ignored The Chromebook, which I never was bought, seemed finally like something worth trying, until I realized it was only a Google cloud computing client, and not expandable in any way and not for Linux, but for Google. Not in the spirit of Linux. I got interested in the Raptor II when it was announced, until I saw the price. And I read various reports of software not working properly on it. It reminded me very much of my Power Mac G5, only performance-wise faster and state-of-the-art, naturally, but still with the same problems. I might be wrong, but I'm afraid to try it only to find I cannot compile Firefox or KDE Plasma desktop without regularly filing bug reports and fix issues with the developers... That's not how I use my desktop Linux. So where does this put us then? Where is my FOSS Linux desktop and notebook, that is not a Windows PC? I'll probably buy a RISC-V board when it ever becomes available, in the form of a Raspberry Pi equivalent. Because I'd pay ~ 100 to 200 Dollars, which is absolutely worth it for a hobby. If something doesn't run... I don't care, at that price. But not when I pay thousands of Dollars for an expandable main desktop system. Considering that the generalized topic is "Is a [x, where x is non-x86 mainstream] a good general-purpose desktop?" -- what is more general purpose than a desktop system? But maybe a unique desktop Linux system in form of (more) open hardware is just a dream and there is no market for it? (Considering how well it works on x86 anyways, so maybe that's what desktop Linux is supposed to use...) Linux User #330250
Succes! Thanks!
Hi All! if you can read it.. it means that my iBook is rocking. X11 and WiFi (Airport) included. For weeks X11 and ATI drivers were broken beyond usage. I performed a full system upgrade. 6.1.0-7-powerpc #1 Debian 6.1.20-1 (2023-03-19) ppc GNU/Linux :00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Rage Mobility L AGP 2x (rev 64) running on my iBook G3. X11 works. It has some serious refresh glitches, but they go away, all artefacts are gone. So I can send this message natively with GNUMail running on GNUstep on latest Debian/ppc Riccardo -- Produly sent with GNUMail on Debian/PPC running on an iBook G3.
