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I have been keeping an eye on Raptor and Talos for a while now, and it's super exciting to see another cpu-platform with security and openess in mind. As a GNU+

I have been keeping an eye on Raptor and Talos for a while now, and it's super exciting to see another cpu-platform with security and openess in mind. As a GNU+Linux guy, has anyone had any experience with GNU+Linux on the Power platform? What kind of differences could I expect. I've been itching to build a new AMD Naples 64 core (2x cpu) server, but I have to admit I'm tempted to just do AMD Ryzen for my upcoming desktop build and do a Talos II for the server.

pedrocr 9y ago
I was curious as well and it seems the latest Ubuntu LTS has POWER8+ as a supported architecture[1]. Debian should also run just fine I imagine. Hopefully someone else has actual experience on how it runs. [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/ppc64el/ch02s01.html#idm46127827825152 https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/ppc64el/ch02s...
cat199 9y ago
No idea recently, but even back in the apple PPC days pretty much everything worked. The things that didn't were typically lesser used desktoppy things or more community written software that didn't take endianness into consideration. If you're not afraid to dig into sources alot of things only took adding an endianness hack / byteswap to certain lines to make things work properly. Also to check into are some languages/compilers/interpreters simply might not have a backend for your CPU. If you use any of these critically you might double check; common things like perl/python/java/ruby should be fine. I'd expect most server-side / computation oriented things should be fine- desktop, etc, not so sure especially since noone is making any power based workstations these days, though remote GUI mgmt is still useful in some annoying cases Overall stability, barring per-platform issues should be fine as well. basically, if you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirty from time to time, it should be okay; not sure of support for this particular board / firmware/ etc though.. hopefully someone with recent experience can confirm
- jabl 9y ago
  Most Linux work for modern POWER seems to be for the ppc64le target, which runs the CPU in little endian mode. That being said, there's probably a lot of libraries with x86-64 ASM kernels in them which will run slower if they have to use the generic C/whatever version on power.
  - hsivonen 9y ago
    In terms of network effects of ISA-specific optimizations, it's problematic that not only is the workstation so expensive but POWER8/9 cloud availability seems to be only for orgs that buy a lot of compute time. If you are a dev who isn't being paid by e.g. IBM or Red Hat to work on ppc64le stuff, it seems hard to get access to running your code on real hardware and running on qemu doesn't really make sense for optimizations. It seems to me that the ISA could benefit from scaling down so that more developers had access.
    - CrystalGamma 9y ago
      They're already scaling down … in the POWER8 Talos campaign, the cheapest CPU option was something like $1300, the CPU they're offering here is only $300. And the board, because you don't need expensive memory buffer chips anymore, is almost half the price as then.
      - zymhan 9y ago
        Yeah previously it was over $4,000 for the board and CPU, this is nearly half the price. If they can keep this up, I could actually fork over the money for the 3rd gen.
        torpcoms 9y ago
        Talos Model 3. Oh wait, wrong company.
  - torpcoms 9y ago
    Fedora and RHEL do seem to come in big endian versions as well as little endian. Have not seen any other distros that do though.
yellowapple 9y ago
Most things should be similar. Proprietary drivers (like for graphics cards) obviously won't work (though the firmware should, I reckon, since that's independent of the host CPU). Proprietary software in general probably won't work unless you can convince the vendor to ship a POWER build. Even some FOSS might not work fully (or even at all) if it relies too much on specific architectures (in particular, I know V8 - and therefore both Chromium and Node.js - only very recently got POWER ports). I personally run OpenBSD on all my (Apple) PowerPC hardware; it seems to work a lot more reliably than the Linux distros I've tried (in particular, I remember the install process for Debian being rather painful on PowerPC due to OpenFirmware, while OpenBSD is just as easy as it is on x86: mash the Enter key until you have a working system; at most, I sometimes need to tweak some boot settings at the OF prompt, namely if it was previously running OS X).
- vaskas 9y ago
  Just curious, what do you use OpenBSD on macppc for, and which version? Debian PowerPC version has a few bugs but at least the desktop package selection has been decent, shame that the port lost the official status.
  - yellowapple 9y ago
    I have a PowerBook G4 that was at one point a daily driver, plus an eMac that was running at one point but needs a new hard drive; those were/are both in desktop roles. I also have a Power Mac G5 and an XServe G5 in server roles. All of them have OpenBSD 5.9 installed (except the eMac, which had OpenBSD 6.0 installed before the hard drive failed). The XServe and Power Mac are in storage right now, but I'd like to get the Powerbook upgraded to 6.1 eventually (I want to stick full-disk encryption on it, too, so I'll probably just blow away the existing install and start from scratch).
    - vaskas 9y ago
      6.1 for macppc doesn't ship with any web browsers except for text-based and Netsurf sadly. It struggled on my 1Ghz iBook speed wise too. I am going to give it a fresh look on a DP 1Ghz Quicksilver too.

pedrocr 9y ago

I was curious as well and it seems the latest Ubuntu LTS has POWER8+ as a supported architecture[1]. Debian should also run just fine I imagine. Hopefully someone else has actual experience on how it runs. [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/ppc64el/ch02s01.html#idm46127827825152 https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/ppc64el/ch02s...

cat199 9y ago

No idea recently, but even back in the apple PPC days pretty much everything worked. The things that didn't were typically lesser used desktoppy things or more community written software that didn't take endianness into consideration. If you're not afraid to dig into sources alot of things only took adding an endianness hack / byteswap to certain lines to make things work properly. Also to check into are some languages/compilers/interpreters simply might not have a backend for your CPU. If you use any of these critically you might double check; common things like perl/python/java/ruby should be fine. I'd expect most server-side / computation oriented things should be fine- desktop, etc, not so sure especially since noone is making any power based workstations these days, though remote GUI mgmt is still useful in some annoying cases Overall stability, barring per-platform issues should be fine as well. basically, if you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirty from time to time, it should be okay; not sure of support for this particular board / firmware/ etc though.. hopefully someone with recent experience can confirm

jabl 9y ago
Most Linux work for modern POWER seems to be for the ppc64le target, which runs the CPU in little endian mode. That being said, there's probably a lot of libraries with x86-64 ASM kernels in them which will run slower if they have to use the generic C/whatever version on power.
- hsivonen 9y ago
  In terms of network effects of ISA-specific optimizations, it's problematic that not only is the workstation so expensive but POWER8/9 cloud availability seems to be only for orgs that buy a lot of compute time. If you are a dev who isn't being paid by e.g. IBM or Red Hat to work on ppc64le stuff, it seems hard to get access to running your code on real hardware and running on qemu doesn't really make sense for optimizations. It seems to me that the ISA could benefit from scaling down so that more developers had access.
  - CrystalGamma 9y ago
    They're already scaling down … in the POWER8 Talos campaign, the cheapest CPU option was something like $1300, the CPU they're offering here is only $300. And the board, because you don't need expensive memory buffer chips anymore, is almost half the price as then.
    - zymhan 9y ago
      Yeah previously it was over $4,000 for the board and CPU, this is nearly half the price. If they can keep this up, I could actually fork over the money for the 3rd gen.
      - torpcoms 9y ago
        Talos Model 3. Oh wait, wrong company.
- torpcoms 9y ago
  Fedora and RHEL do seem to come in big endian versions as well as little endian. Have not seen any other distros that do though.

yellowapple 9y ago

Most things should be similar. Proprietary drivers (like for graphics cards) obviously won't work (though the firmware should, I reckon, since that's independent of the host CPU). Proprietary software in general probably won't work unless you can convince the vendor to ship a POWER build. Even some FOSS might not work fully (or even at all) if it relies too much on specific architectures (in particular, I know V8 - and therefore both Chromium and Node.js - only very recently got POWER ports). I personally run OpenBSD on all my (Apple) PowerPC hardware; it seems to work a lot more reliably than the Linux distros I've tried (in particular, I remember the install process for Debian being rather painful on PowerPC due to OpenFirmware, while OpenBSD is just as easy as it is on x86: mash the Enter key until you have a working system; at most, I sometimes need to tweak some boot settings at the OF prompt, namely if it was previously running OS X).

vaskas 9y ago
Just curious, what do you use OpenBSD on macppc for, and which version? Debian PowerPC version has a few bugs but at least the desktop package selection has been decent, shame that the port lost the official status.
- yellowapple 9y ago
  I have a PowerBook G4 that was at one point a daily driver, plus an eMac that was running at one point but needs a new hard drive; those were/are both in desktop roles. I also have a Power Mac G5 and an XServe G5 in server roles. All of them have OpenBSD 5.9 installed (except the eMac, which had OpenBSD 6.0 installed before the hard drive failed). The XServe and Power Mac are in storage right now, but I'd like to get the Powerbook upgraded to 6.1 eventually (I want to stick full-disk encryption on it, too, so I'll probably just blow away the existing install and start from scratch).
  - vaskas 9y ago
    6.1 for macppc doesn't ship with any web browsers except for text-based and Netsurf sadly. It struggled on my 1Ghz iBook speed wise too. I am going to give it a fresh look on a DP 1Ghz Quicksilver too.