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Showing posts from September, 2019

CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream (The Freshmaker)


Yeah, okay, we've had a lot to say about Red Hat derivatives lately. On the heels of CentOS 7's latest service release now comes CentOS 8 in a new minty flavour CentOS Stream, "a midstream distribution that provides a cleared-path for participation in creating the next version of RHEL," rebranding the "classic" CentOS build from RHEL as CentOS Linux. Mentally translating, the intention appears to be as a staging area for updates from Fedora mainline to trickle into minor releases of RHEL (and thence to mainline CentOS), using CentOS Stream to more gradually introduce updates and incorporate user feedback in a rolling release fashion rather than the typical all-at-once version churn that previously resulted. You know, like chewy candy mints that make things fresher the moment you pop one in your mouth.

That said, mainline Fedora is plenty stable for (my) daily use on POWER9 and elsewhere (we're not talking bleeding-edge saddle sore Rawhide, kids), and Fedora will still be the ultimate upstream, so while I think this will help CentOS developers dogfood changes more gradually I'm having difficulty envisioning the small slice of conservative-but-not-that-conservative users this will appeal to as a daily driver. More likely people will simply regard it as the "public beta" channel for CentOS and RHEL, and I think that will be the actual role it serves regardless of the frilly language.

The CentOS Download site is not currently showing Power ISA (or other AltArch) builds for either CentOS 8 or CentOS Stream yet, but I expect these to emerge soon. It will be interesting to see if big-endian ppc64 is still supported when they do, but there should be POWER9 and "generic" little-endian builds at minimum.

Low-level change to Firefox 70 and ESR coming


If you are using Firefox on 64-bit Power, you'll want to know about bug 1576303 which will be landing soon on the beta and ESR68 trees to be incorporated into 70 and the next ESR respectively. This fixes a long-standing issue with intermittent and difficult to trace crashes (thanks to Ted Campbell at Mozilla for figuring out the root cause and Dan Horák for providing the hardware access) due to what in retrospect was a blatant violation of the ELF ABI in xpconnect, which glues JavaScript to native XPCOM. This needed several dodgy workarounds until we found the actual culprit.

The patch is well tested on multiple little-endian systems including this Talos II, but because it's an issue with register allocation in function calls the issue also theoretically affects big-endian Power even though we haven't seen any reports. I'm pretty sure the code I wrote will work for big-endian but none of my big-endian Power systems run mainline Firefox (and TenFourFox even on the G5 is 32-bit, where the problem isn't present). If you're using a big-endian system, you may want to pull a current release and make sure there is no regression in the browser with the changes; if there is and you can bisect to it, post in the bug so we can do a follow-up fix. On the other hand, if you're building from an old ESR such as 52 (the last non-Rust-required one), you may want to backport this fix because the problem has been there pretty much since it was first written.

Stuff like this actually proves Linus Torvalds' point that "as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable." Linus was talking about ARM-based servers being undercut by a dearth of ARM-based PCs, but the point is also true here: 64-bit Power may do well in the data center but it was rarely used for workstations other than the Power Mac G5 and the small number of non-Apple PowerPC 970 towers, meaning this bug went undiscovered until people like us finally started dogfooding Power-based desktops again. (For that matter, the official PowerPC Mac OS X builds of Firefox were also always 32-bit, even on the G5, so no one would have noticed it there.) There's just no substitute for improving the quality and quantity of software for Power ISA like having one under your desk, and as the number of machines increases I expect we'll get more of these ugly corner bugs ironed out in other packages too.

CentOS 7-1908 available


CentOS 7-1908 is now available; this is a maintenance release with multiple updated components derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7. Particularly interesting is that there are no less than three Power ISA downloads available, one for big-endian ppc64 (though POWER7 and up only: sorry G5 owners), one for ppc64le and a special build for POWER9 (which appears to also be little-endian), each with its own Everything, NetInstall and Minimal flavours.

Linux 5.3 for POWER, and ppc64le gets a Fedora Desktop


Linus always says that no Linux release is a feature release and numbers are purely bookkeeping instead of goalposts, but Linux 5.3 has landed. There are many changes for the x86 side of the fence that I won't mention here, but in platform-agnostic changes, 5.3 adds support for the AMD Navi GPU in amdgpu, allows loading of xz-compressed firmware files, further improves the situation with process ID reuse with additional expansions to pidfd (including polling support), refinements to the scheduler by supporting clamped processor clock ranges, and support for 0.0.0.0/8 as a valid IPv4 range, allowing another 16 million IPv4 addresses while IPv6 continues to not set the world on fire.

Power ISA-specific changes in this release are relatively few but still noteworthy. Besides support for LZMA and LZO-compressed uImages, there is now Power ISA support for HAVE_ARCH_HUGE_VMAP, which enables (as the name would suggest) huge virtual memory mappings. With additional code in a future kernel, this should facilitate upcoming performance improvements. There is also additional /proc support for getting statistics on how virtual CPUs are dispatched to physical cores by systems using the Power hypervisor.

Meanwhile, this won't make much difference to people like me who have been using Fedora for awhile, but if you want to experiment with other distros on your POWER9 system Fedora is working on Live and Workstation ISOs for ppc64le. Currently this is Rawhide only (which is what will become F32) and you can of course already install from Server and switch to the Workstation flavour, or install over the network. However, it's just another positive indicator that IBM's purchase of Red Hat will continue facilitating improvements in Linux in general and Fedora/RHEL support for OpenPOWER in particular, especially as the installed base of POWER9 workstations like our T2s and Blackbirds continues to grow in numbers. In fact, although we don't have statistics, it's still quite possible (counting box for box) that there are now more discrete POWER9 workstations in operation out there than there are servers.

A beginner's guide to hacking Microwatt


Many improvements have occurred in Microwatt, the little VHDL Power ISA softcore, so far the easiest way — particularly for us hobbyists — of getting an OpenPOWER core in hardware you can play with. (The logo is not an official logo for Microwatt, but I figured it would be fun to try my hand at one in Krita.) Even though it still has many known and acknowledged deficiencies it's actually pretty easy to get it up and running in simulation, and easier still on POWER9 hardware where the toolchain is already ready to go.

I'm no VHDL genius personally, but this seemed like as good a time as any to learn. ghdl is available for most distros, though Fedora 30 and earlier curiously lack it for ppc64le; fortunately, Dan Horák's builds work fine. So let's get the basics up. If you're on F30 as I am, install ghdl from his repo first. These URLs may vary; they are what was current at the time of this article.

% sudo dnf install https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/sharkcz/danny/fedora-30-ppc64le/01028671-ghdl/ghdl-grt-0.37dev-1.20190820gitf977ba0.fc30.ppc64le.rpm
[...]
% sudo dnf install https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/sharkcz/danny/fedora-30-ppc64le/01028671-ghdl/ghdl-0.37dev-1.20190820gitf977ba0.fc30.ppc64le.rpm
[...]

For Debian and other distros, install from your package manager as appropriate.

Next, let's install Microwatt and MicroPython and make sure all that works. This is essentially the same demo Anton showed at the OpenPOWER summit. If you are doing this on an inferior x86_64 system (or at least something that isn't POWER8 or POWER9), you will need to have a Power ISA C cross-compilation toolchain installed to properly build MicroPython. Adjust the make -jXX to your number of threads. This sequence of commands will end up with microwatt/ and micropython/ installed in separate directories at the same filesystem depth (in my case, ~/src). Keep it this way because we will be adding one more project at the end.

% git clone git://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt.git
Cloning into 'microwatt'...
[...]
Resolving deltas: 100% (818/818), done.
% cd microwatt
% make -j24
ghdl -a --std=08 decode_types.vhdl
[...]
% cd ..
% git clone git://github.com/mikey/micropython.git
Cloning into 'micropython'...
[...]
Resolving deltas: 100% (52248/52248), done.
% cd micropython
% git checkout powerpc
Already on 'powerpc'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/powerpc'.
% cd ports/powerpc
% make -j24
mkdir -p build/genhdr
[...]
MISC freezing bytecode
CC build/_frozen_mpy.c
LINK build/firmware.elf
[...]
% cd ../../../microwatt
% ln -s ../micropython/ports/powerpc/build/firmware.bin simple_ram_behavioural.bin
% ./core_tb > /dev/null
MicroPython v1.11-320-g7747411e9 on 2019-09-14; bare-metal with POWERPC
Type "help()" for more information.
>>> 1+2
3

The simulation is rather slow, made worse by all the copious debugging output (which here is sent to the bitbucket), but it does work as advertised. To make core_tb stop, you will probably need to kill it from another terminal session, depending on your shell. (I had to.)

Let's now turn to adding instructions to Microwatt. Since having to manually kill the simulation is annoying — it would be nice if the simulation could gracefully halt under program control — we'll implement a wait instruction as an educational example. This instruction is new in ISA 3.0B; the ISA book explains its operation as that it "causes instruction fetching and execution to be suspended. Instruction fetching and execution are resumed when the events specified by the WC field [the wait condition, its sole constant parameter] occur." Strictly speaking probably the stop instruction would have the most authentic semantics — "The thread is placed into power-saving mode and execution is stopped." — but for obvious reasons this is a privileged instruction because this would completely halt that hardware thread until a system reset or other system-level event. Also, it doesn't take any parameters, so it's not as nice an illustration.

wait's sole supported WC field code is 0b00; this causes the instruction to "[r]esume instruction fetching and execution when an exception, an event-based branch exception, or a platform notify occurs." In practical circumstances, if you execute wait from a userspace program, these events happen all the time and the instruction seems like a no-op.

% more test.c
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  __asm__("wait 0\n");
  fprintf(stderr, "ok\n");
  return 0;
}
% gcc -o test test.c
% ./test
ok

However, on a little core doing nothing else, it well might be a terminal instruction sequence, so since we can run it from userspace anyway let's go ahead and implement a hal-fassed version of it which will cause the simulation to conclude gracefully. This is the diff that does so, applied against ab34c483. Let's analyze it piece by piece.

First, let us note that there's already code in Microwatt for an ungraceful exit, such as when you execute an undefined instruction; this terminates with an error. We could simply use that, but I'd prefer to do something cleaner, so we'll define a new signal for halting.

Next, we will define the opcode format in the instruction decoder. Conveniently, the instructions td and tdi (trap doubleword and trap doubleword immediate, respectively) have a similar encoding where their common constant argument — the "TO" or trap operation bits — occupies the same bit field. (Note that td et al. allow five bits here but wait only takes the two least significant bits with the other three reserved. We will handwave this away since they are invariably encoded as zero.) To get these bits decoded for us, we specify that the first constant argument is encoded as TOO. You can see other encodings for registers and immediates in the surrounding templates.

Next, we tell Microwatt how to identify the opcode. The bit fields for the opcode pieces are simply cribbed from the ISA book.

Next, we add the actual symbols for the instruction and the operation, thus linking them up with the decoder.

Then, we write the operation's logic. For illustrative purposes, since only 0b00 is allowed and other bit combinations are reserved, we will have the simulation assert and ungracefully terminate on other values using the existing code. Otherwise, we set the halted signal.

Finally, we write the code to actually gracefully halt when the halted signal appears, using the built-in VHDL test bench function stop() (coincidentally named, as it happens).

With this patch applied, rebuild Microwatt with a make. To test it, we'll need something that actually executes this instruction, so let's make a simple "hello world" type example using pieces from MicroPython and Microwatt's own built-in "hello world." A small assembly language stub (in both of these examples, head.S) acts as a trampoline into whatever our main() is, detecting if we are running it within QEMU or from the VHDL test bench. However, we won't have a libc and we'll need routines to actually send and receive data with the "serial console" presented by the core. We also need a couple hints for the linker to make a binary we can actually run in the simulator.

I've compiled all of these pieces into a Github project "Microhello," which you can use as a scaffold for your own programs to run on the core. I've tried to make it a little more modularized than the Microwatt "Hello World" example as well. Clone it at the same depth as microwatt/ and micropython/, then do make runrun to replace the symbolic link to the MicroPython binary with Microhello:

% git clone git://github.com/classilla/microhello.git
[...]
% cd microhello
% make runrun
cc -I. -g -Wall -std=c99 -msoft-float -mno-string -mno-multiple -mno-vsx -mno-altivec -mlittle-endian -fno-stack-protector -mstrict-align -ffreestanding -Os -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -c -o build/main.o main.c
cc -I. -g -Wall -std=c99 -msoft-float -mno-string -mno-multiple -mno-vsx -mno-altivec -mlittle-endian -fno-stack-protector -mstrict-align -ffreestanding -Os -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -c -o build/uart_core.o uart_core.c
cc -I. -g -Wall -std=c99 -msoft-float -mno-string -mno-multiple -mno-vsx -mno-altivec -mlittle-endian -fno-stack-protector -mstrict-align -ffreestanding -Os -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -c -o build/string.o string.c
cc head.S -c -o build/head.o
ld -N -T powerpc.lds -o build/firmware.elf build/main.o build/uart_core.o build/string.o build/head.o powerpc.lds
size build/firmware.elf

text   data    bss    dec    hex filename
6508      0     24   6532   1984 build/firmware.elf
objcopy -O binary build/firmware.elf build/firmware.bin
( cd ../microwatt && rm -f simple_ram_behavioural.bin )
/usr/bin/make run
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/censored/src/microhello'
( cd ../microwatt && \
ln -s ../microhello/build/firmware.bin simple_ram_behavioural.bin && \
./core_tb > /dev/null )
PowerPC to the People

We neatly came to a halt. Yay!

The serial console library is in uart_core.c and a basic implementation of puts() (and strlen()) is in string.c. The main() is very simple. Minus the comments, here is main.c in its entirety:

#include "uart_core.h"
#include "string.h"

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  uart_init_ppc(argc);

  puts("PowerPC to the People");
  __asm__("wait 0\n");
  return 0;
}

The trampoline uses the start of execution to determine what mode to initialize the serial console in, passing that to main() in r3, which in the Power ABI is the first argument to the function (argc). We then puts() the string and execute a wait 0 to terminate. Easy.

To prove the argument is being evaluated, change the instruction to wait 3 and re-run with make runrun. Notice how it terminates:

PowerPC to the People
make[1]: *** [Makefile:16: run] Error 1

If you run ./core_tb (in the microwatt/) directory without sending the output to /dev/null, you will see the message from our implementation in the log with the invalid wait condition.

Lastly, if you remove the wait instruction entirely and re-run with make runrun, then the test bench will loop forever echoing our string repeatedly, bouncing in and out of our code on the trampoline, until you kill it.

Microwatt is fun, simple, easy to experiment with and a great way to better understand what Power ISA does under the hood. While its performance is no barnburner, as a pedagogical aid it's a great little proof of concept, and it can certainly be the basis for something bigger. In a future article we'll actually synthesize this core and do a little more with it in actual hardware.

Firefox 69 on POWER


A brief note to say so far no major issues with Firefox 69 on Power ISA and this post is being made from it on my T2. (We're still dealing with bug 1576303 for Firefox 70, however.) As with Fx68, the working build configurations for ppc64le are unchanged from Fx67.