Tonight's game on OpenPOWER: ZGloom

We've done some DOS games recently, so for a change of pace let's do an Amiga one. Gloom was a pretty unabashed Doom knockoff using an Wolfenstein-type engine with some map geometry enhancements and transparency and palette effects. I actually have it on my A4000T and it's a bit blocky but plays pretty well with AGA and an '060. You know the drill: marine type guy shoots up other malicious marines, and, um, skinheads, and robots, and then ends up in a Gothic tomb as you do besieged by monsters and ghosts, and then goes to hell, takes the fight to the demons and kills a big dragon to save civilization. Just another day at the office! Its creators made it freely distributable and open-sourced the engine, allowing reimplementations to be made; probably the most developed of these is ZGloom. ZGloom isn't a perfect port — it's missing the title screens, the font and HUD are different, and there are various bugs ranging from trivial to moderate — but it has all the interstitials for what little story there is, has music and sound effects, plays well and does so at high resolution, and has configurable controls with X-axis mouselook. Also, because it's software-rendered, OpenPOWER systems with just the BMC framebuffer can play just fine (it has a multithreaded renderer to take advantage of all those shiny cores we've got). There's no save feature, but ZGloom simply gives you infinite lives, so just keep grinding away with impunity — and while you only have one weapon at a time, you can power it up, so grab all the bouncing orbs you can get for a real supercharge. Doors and switches are triggered by just walking into them, and baby bottles (!) give you health. There are other useful powerups you can find ...

I should also note for the squeamish that Gloom infamously came in "Messy" (temporary gibs) and "Meaty" (permanent gibs) modes, and this port seems to entirely play in "Meaty" mode, which means enemies explode and litter the ground with an alarmingly fast accumulation of body parts. On the original Amiga this would have brought lower-specced systems to their 16-bit knees, but this is a POWER9, so we can have all the fragmented torsos we want. (I have intentionally not shown this in the screenshot.) Don't say I didn't warn you.

Building it from source is straightforward; Fedora 36 has SDL2, SDL2_mixer and libxmp. Before you type make (or make -j24), however, edit the Makefile and add -O3 -mcpu=power9 to the CXXFLAGS. Then download this ZIP of the game resources, unzip it, and copy or symlink the ZGloom binary inside the resulting directory. While you can jump to any level from the main menu, game settings (graphics, keys, etc.) are controlled from the in-game menu after you actually start one.

Now things get serious!

Firefox 105 on POWER

Firefox 105 is out. No, it's not your imagination: I ended up skipping a couple versions. I wasn't able to build Firefox 103 because gcc 12 in Fedora 36 caused weird build failures until it was finally fixed; separately, building 104 and working more on the POWER9 JavaScript JIT got delayed because I'd finally had it with the performance issues and breakage in GNOME 42 and took a couple weeks renovating Plasma so I could be happy with my desktop environment again. Now I'm on track again with everything hopefully maintainable and my workflows properly restored, and we're back to the grind with both those concerns largely resolved.

Unfortunately, we have a couple new ones. Debug builds broke in Fx103 using our standard .mozconfig when mfbt/lz4/xxhash.h was upgraded, because we compile with -Og and it wants to compile its functions with static __inline__ __attribute__((always_inline, unused)). When gcc builds a deoptimized debugging build and fails to inline those functions, it throws a compilation error, and the build screeches to a halt. (This doesn't affect Fedora's build because they always build at a sufficient optimization level such that these functions do indeed get inlined.) After a little thinking, this is the new debug .mozconfig:

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc
export CXX=/usr/bin/g++

mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j24" # or as you likez
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-Og -mcpu=power9 -fpermissive -DXXH_NO_INLINE_HINTS=1"
ac_add_options --enable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-linker=bfd
ac_add_options --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries

export GN=/home/censored/bin/gn # if you haz

This builds, or at least compiles, but fails at linkage because of the second problem. This time, it's libwebrtc ... again. To glue the Google build system onto Mozilla's, there is a fragile and system-dependent permuting-processing step that again has broken and Mozilla would like a definitive fix. Until then, we're high and dry because the request is for the generated build file to be generated correctly rather than just patching the generated build file. That's a much bigger knot to unravel and building the gn tool it depends on used to be incredibly difficult (it's now much easier and I was able to upgrade, but all this has done is show me where the problem is and it's not a straightforward fix). If this is not repaired, then various screen capture components used by libwebrtc are not compiled, and linking will fail. Right now it looks like we're the only platform affected even though aarch64 has been busted by the same underlying issue in the past.

The easy choice, especially if you don't use WebRTC, is just add ac_add_options --disable-webrtc to your .mozconfig. I don't use WebRTC much and I'm pretty lazy so ordinarily I would go this route — except you, gentle reader, expect me to be able to tell you when Firefox compiles are breaking, so that brings us to the second option: Dan Horák's patch. This also works and is the version I'm typing into now. Expect you will have to carry this patch in your local tree for a couple versions until this gets dealt with.

Fortunately, the PGO-LTO patch for Firefox 101 still applies to Fx105, so you can still use that. While the optimized .mozconfig is unchanged, here it is for reference:

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc
export CXX=/usr/bin/g++

mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j24" # or as you likez
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O3 -mcpu=power9 -fpermissive"
ac_add_options --enable-release
ac_add_options --enable-linker=bfd
ac_add_options --enable-lto=full
ac_add_options --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries
ac_add_options MOZ_PGO=1

export GN=/home/censored/bin/gn # if you haz
export RUSTC_OPT_LEVEL=2

I've got one other issue to settle, and then I hope to get back to porting the JavaScript and Wasm JIT to 102ESR. But my real life and my $DAYJOB interfere with my after-hours hacking, so contributors still solicited so our work can benefit the OpenPOWER community. When it's one person working on it, things are slower.

Void PPC goes Chimera (and bust)

Void PPC maintainer Daniel Kolesa has announced that instead of simply phasing out big-endian support in Void in 2022, he will instead cease maintaining the PowerPC/Power ISA fork of Void Linux entirely in favour of Chimera Linux, a fusion of a Linux kernel, musl libc and FreeBSD userland built with LLVM. There may even be a return of support for big-endian, at least for 64-bit Power (32-bit Power to be considered), as well as Chimera's core support for ppc64le, aarch64 and x86_64 (with 64-bit RISC-V coming).

As with the announcement for big-endian, if you like Void PPC and want to maintain it yourself, you can — provided you bring your own build and distribution infrastructure. Otherwise, Void PPC maintenance will end in January 2023. You can try Chimera Linux in the meantime and see how it works for you.

The RAD750's successor looks like it's RISC-V

It's been PowerPC in space for decades, from the Opportunity rover (a 20MHz BAE RAD6000, based on POWER1) to the James Webb Telescope (a 118MHz RAD750 "G3"). These are battle-tested processors in extremely hostile conditions, such as the Juno space probe in orbit around Jupiter where the RAD750 (a 132MHz part with 128MB of DRAM) operates in radiation levels a million times the human lethal dose. As evidence of its performance, it was supposed to be deorbited for destruction in 2021, but was extended to 2025 to examine the inner moons of Ganymede, Europa and Io.

Still, PowerPC never had a monopoly: the European Space Agency uses LEON, which is actually a free and open SPARC V8 core, and NASA has also used MIPS processors such as the 12MHz Mongoose-V (based on the R3000) used in New Horizons, which visited Pluto. A cluster of ARM-based "Rad-Tol Dependable Multiprocessors" (PDF) with OMAP 3503 cores will fly on the 6U CubeSat Lunar Flashlight nanosatellite scheduled for later this year after SLS Artemis 1 got scratched. For non-mission critical components, even some off-the-shelf ARM cores have made it to space; the Perseverance rover is another RAD750 system at 133MHz, but the Ingenuity helicopter drone it deployed was a regular Qualcomm Snapdragon 801.

BAE does have later generation Power parts available today: the RAD510 SOC, a system-on-a-chip with twice the performance of the RAD750, and the RAD5500 family with the RAD5545, derived from the ISA 2.06 NXP e5500. These are all Power ISA, all radiation-hardened, and all available from BAE's Manassas, Virginia facility, a U.S. Department of Defense Category 1A Microelectronics Trusted Source. (The RAD510 core is actually made by GlobalFoundries Fab 10 — one of IBM's former fabs.) With those on the shelf it's a bit puzzling that SiFive announced their X280 (U74-derived) core with vector extensions and AI/ML support will be the heart of NASA's next-generation High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor instead, or more accurately eight of them (an additional four unspecified general-purpose RISC-V cores round out the total to 12). The chips are being developed on a radiation- and fault-tolerant process by Microchip Technology over the next three years, at a cost of US$50 million. More than just the added processing capability, probably what gives it a greater edge is lower expected power usage on a smaller process size and the ability to shut down silicon blocks for even greater power savings.

It would have to be indeed a significant technical leap to justify a complete break from a well-understood architecture and we'll see soon enough if it's worth it. That said, assuming it accumulates the same stellar track record as the BAE Power parts, the RISC-V HPSC will likely have its own decades-long run in space (assuming Jack Kang, SiFive's idiot senior vice president of business development, can stop smoking crack: there are still more PowerPC programmers than RISC-V programmers even now, chumpcakes). For that matter, the ESA is interested in RISC-V too and we approve of any free computing solution as long as it does the job. But don't cry for Power ISA in space yet; with three years of HPSC development to go, and several critical missions in progress, there's plenty of universe to explore no matter what CPU is doing the exploring. As HPSC will just be one choice of many even at NASA, Power ISA parts are likely to remain part of this very conservative industry for awhile, especially in commercial and military applications.

What's Arctic Tern good for, anyway?

Arctic Tern (and its associated soft-BMC Kestrel) is a product that's hard to describe just looking at it. Is it a boot accelerator? Is it a BMC replacement? Is it a development board? Is it OpenPOWER's answer to the Pi Nano? (Answers to pop quiz: yes (in the sense you get the BMC up quicker), yes, yes, and sort of but not really, since the clock speed is too low and it lacks some accoutrements.)

Raptor's new manual should address some of these concerns, and particularly covers the worry I and others had about bricking our system trying to get it installed (disclosure: yours truly reviewed a pre-release copy and submitted comments). Yes, it does need a PCIe slot if you want it to act as a VGA controller or USB host device; yes, it comes with all the necessary cables, including a JTAG programmer; yes, it's compatible with the Blackbird; no, soldering isn't required. But the instructions that are there are step by step and copiously decorated with illustrative photographs such that anyone reasonably handy with their machine should be able to do it.

Instead, the biggest roadblock to the casual interest will likely be the programming: you have to build the FPGA bitstream and firmware image yourself, and then flash your unit manually. The modules don't come preconfigured. (What, did you think that JTAG box was included just for giggles?) Raptor provides Kestrel source and instructions for Debian Linux on an OpenPOWER host in the manual, but the instructions are lengthy, and there is no public build or any other binaries presently available. This is primarily due to the rapid background development but also consider it a minimum "hacker" threshold required to join the club. Other operating systems on Raptor or OpenPOWER hosts should work, but x86_64 users will have to bring up their own toolchains. Raptor did say that at some point there will be "known good" images, though when that will be is an open question since the Kestrel source isn't even close to stable right now. Compared to that, the requirement that you also patch the on-board BMC to disable it in software seems comparatively minor (and it's reversible).

So who's this good for? Raptor may have their own ideas about that, but from over here typing this on my (now switched over to KDE) Talos II, right now I see this product really for someone who wants all the pieces in one place to play with Microwatt to develop their own embedded applications for it. If you're one of those people, you may not even care about the state of Kestrel anyway; to you it would be merely an example. On the other hand, for those of us looking forward to a fully auditable BMC, Kestrel seems to be working but it may not be sufficient (or sufficiently solid) to replace your BMC today and you'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to do it. If that's all you're interested in, you may want to wait. But it comes with everything you need to get started and for those in its apparent target audience, the barriers to entry don't seem unreasonable.

Linux 5.19

Linux 5.19 is released, largely with more hardware support and new architectures (including an unusual super-modern virtual Motorola 68000 platform to emulate Google Goldfish devices — my real Q800, clockchipped running A/UX, is flabbergasted). Here's a full list of changes.

This release doesn't have a great deal of Power ISA-specific improvements, but one generally positive note can be implied from Linus Torvalds' announcement message: he's now on an Apple silicon laptop, running Asahi Linux. Recall that Asahi Linux uses 16K pages as opposed to 4K pages, and this is still the case; many Power ISA workstation users are on systems that use 64K pages, including this Raptor Talos II running Fedora 36. If software bustage is happening for Linus himself, then it's a good sign that more software will start becoming more flexible about allowing larger memory pages and that's good news for us niche configurations too.

Arctic Tern available for purchase

Raptor now has Arctic Terns available for purchase, along with the user's guide. The US$1600 bundle comes with the PCIe carrier card, one ECP5 FPGA module (using Microwatt, the FPGA OpenPOWER core), FSI and JTAG adaptors and all the necessary cabling to connect to a Talos II system (we presume this means the entire T2 family including the T2 Lite and Blackbird, but it doesn't say — more about that in a moment UPDATE: it does now). As it is designed to completely replace the onboard ASPEED BMC, there are fan, Ethernet and two (!) HDMI connectors on board. There is a second module slot as we surmised, but it appears most board functions will be available with just one FPGA module installed, as provided in this bundle (fortunate since an extra module is US$900).

Unfortunately it looks like it does need its own PCIe slot and people like me with a nearly full loadout will be a bit disappointed if that's truly the case. We don't yet know, because the user's guide doesn't look like it has installation instructions for any T2 family system either even though it does have Raptor's usual studious pinouts and schematics. Being primarily a peripheral, I look forward to seeing additional documentation posted since no one wants to buy a $1600 card, get it home and accidentally brick it and their expensive OpenPOWER computer. Once I get my hands on one, we'll talk more about it.

Tonight's game on OpenPOWER: Duke Nukem II

No, not that Duke Nukem game — I mean the platformer. Before the Build engine wrought PG-13 destruction upon the City of the Angels, which also builds and runs on OpenPOWER, Apogee introduced the world's most egotistical alien exterminator in two episodes of heavily armed hopping around. The first installment in 1991 was poor even among PC games of the time, especially considering the far superior (and also Apogee-published) Commander Keen that came out the year before. But the second episode in 1993 had better graphics, better animation, better music, even a rip-roaring VGA cinematic if you had the hardware:

(Always wear your eyes and ears during target practice, kids!) It generally plays fine in DOSBox, but where's the fun in that? RigelEngine is a re-creation of DN2 that plays like the original DOS game mostly faithfully — pedantic quibbles shortly — along with various enhancements such as widescreen support, shown here in the screenshot.

RigelEngine builds out of the box on Fedora 35 and 36, though it has a rather surprising amount of vendored 3rd-party libraries and additionally requires OpenGL, SDL and SDL_mixer. Make sure to clone it with submodules enabled (e.g., git clone --recursive), then mkdir build ; cd build ; cmake .. ; make.

You'll also need a copy of the game, either the shareware first episode (1MB ZIP) or the full game (which I have, as an early DN3D purchaser). Apogee-3D Realms titles have moved from GOG, our usual drug dealer, to ZOOM Platform. Put the NUKEM2.* files into a directory and point the RigelEngine binary at it, or it will present a basic file picker when you start and then remember those settings.

As a clean room re-creation of the game, the additional features are simply incorporated into the game's regular settings menu (i.e., no specific command line options are used to enable them). Widescreen works just dandy with the exception of the radar and inventory frames which can sometimes blend in with the display a little too well; otherwise, I highly recommend it. On the other hand, the smooth scrolling feature — while being as smooth as advertised — makes playing the game feel a little like I've been stoned, uh, not that I would know anything about that, offisher (too used to those rapid 8-pixel and 4-pixel parallax moves). Also, while I'm being an ungrateful whiner, the introductory VGA cinematic is also not quite right compared to DN2 on my real Am5x86/133 DOS tower: there's an extra pause in the transition between "NEO LA: THE FUTURE" and Duke in the shooting range, and his firing rate in the first scene is too quick (it's fine when you're looking at the target). I know, I know, right? Uncanny valley!

Note that RigelEngine doesn't play the original Duke Nukem (this does), nor Cosmo's Adventure, which uses code descended but different from DN2 (this does).

This is too easy!

Raptor says the Blackbird crunch ends in August (and maybe Arctic Terns too)

Good news for everyone with a Blackbird backorder: Raptor is announcing order fulfillment and restocking by August 31, 2022. This may not mean the order you submit now will get fulfilled by then, but if you have your order already in, the wait will be over soon and new orders should be processed much more quickly. (This date does not apply yet to the Talos II Lite, but I'm sure Raptor is working on it.) In the meantime, if you can't wait, may we suggest a regular T2? Those are in stock and ready for purchase.

Raptor is also stating Arctic Tern will launch in the "next few weeks" for purchase, with the Kestrel soft-BMC onboard and compatible with the entire Raptor family including the full T2 and the 'Bird. We're looking forward to it and expect a review as soon as I can get my hands on a couple. Faster BMC booting is always welcome around here!

Rocky Linux 9.0

With new version 9.0 Rocky Linux joins the list of ppc64le-compatible CentOS clones, along with the already extant AlmaLinux 9 and Circle Linux based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (itself based on Fedora 34). Rocky Linux explicitly requires a POWER9 CPU. Other than that, the big difference is the branding and the governance, but more choice is always good. Download ISOs are available.

CXL is going to eat OMI's lunch

The question is whether that's a bad thing. And as it stands right now, maybe it's not.

High I/O throughput has historically been the shiny IBM dangled to keep people in the Power fold, and was a featured part of the POWER9 roadmap even though those parts never emerged. IBM's solution to the memory throughput problem was the Centaur buffer used in POWER8 and scale-up Cumulus POWER9 systems (as opposed to our scale-out Nimbus POWER9s, which use conventional DDR4 RAM and an on-chip controller), and then for Power10 the Open Memory Interface, or OMI, a subset of OpenCAPI. In these systems, the memory controller-buffer accepts high-level commands from the CPU(s), abstracting away the details of where the underlying physical memory actually is and reordering, fusing or splitting those requests as required. Notoriously, OMI has an on-board controller, and its firmware isn't open-source.

But why should the interconnect be special-purpose? Compute Express Link (CXL) defines three classes of protocol: CXL.io, an enhanced CPU-to-device interconnect based on PCIe 5.0 with enhancements; CXL.cache, allowing peripheral devices to coherently access CPU memory; and CXL.mem, an interface for low-latency access to both volatile and non-volatile memory. Both CXL.cache and CXL.mem are closely related and themselves transmit over a standard PCIe 5.0 PHY. Memory would be an instance of a CXL Type 3 device, implementing both the CXL.io and CXL.mem specifications (Type 1 devices implement CXL.io and CXL.cache, and rely on access to CPU memory; Type 2 devices implement all three protocols, such as GPUs or other types of accelerators). The memory topology is highly flexible. If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Gen-Z, which aimed for an open royalty-free "memory semantic" protocol; Gen-Z started the merge into the CXL Consortium, led by Intel, in January.

IBM was part of Gen-Z, but eventually let it dangle for OpenCAPI and OMI, and while it is a contributing member to CXL this seems to have been as a consequence of its earlier involvement with Gen-Z. But really, what's OMI's practical future anyway? So far we've seen exactly one chipset implementation from one vendor and that implementation has directly harmed Power10's wider adoption apart from IBM's own hardware. OMI promises 25Gbps per lane at a 5ns latency, but Samsung's new CXL memory module puts 512GB of DDR5 RAM on the bus at nearly 32Gbps. It's a cinch that Power11, whenever it gets on the roadmap, would support at least PCIe 5.0 or whatever it is by then and CXL would appear to be a better overlay on that baseline. Devices of all sorts could share a huge memory pool, even GPUs. Plus, a lot more companies are on board and that would mean a lot more choices and greater staying power, plus more likelihood of open driver support the more devices emerge.

There are still some aspects of CXL that aren't clear. Although it's advertised as an open industry standard, there's nothing saying it's royalty or patent-free (Gen-Z explicitly was, or at least the former), and the download for the specification has an access agreement. The open aspect may not be much better either: Samsung has an ASIC controller in their memory device but it still may need a blob to drive it, either internally or as part of CPU firmware (earlier prototypes used an FPGA), and nothing says that another manufacturer might not require it either.

Still, OMI has the growing stench of death around it, and it never got the ecosystem support IBM was hoping for; CXL currently looks like everything technologically OMI was to be and more, and at least so far not substantially worse from a policy perspective. Other than as a sop to their legacy customers, one may easily conclude there's no technological nor practical reason to keep OMI in future IBM processors. With nothing likely changing on the horizon for Power10's firmware, that may be cautiously good news for us for a future Power11 option.

Firefox 102 on POWER

Firefox 102 is out, not an earth shattering release but with some welcome privacy improvements. It builds out of the box on this Talos II using the PGO-LTO patch from Firefox 101 and the .mozconfigs from Firefox 95.

Firefox 102 is also the basis for the next Extended Support Release, with support for 91ESR (the current version) due to end on September 20 with the release of Firefox 105. Due to a family emergency, I've been out of the country for a bit and haven't been doing much with any projects, let alone the POWER9 JIT (this is why we need more people working on it!). Now that I've been back for a few days and more or less in the swing of things again, it's time to dust it off and forward port the current version to 102 so people doing ESR JIT builds for Fx91 can continue to do so with Fx102. I'll make an announcement and post a patch set when it's ready.

And now a real RISC-V laptop ... maybe

Phoronix is reporting the first production RISC-V laptop, (code?) named ROMA, with "a quad-core RISC-V CPU (although clock frequencies are not noted), a GPU/NPU accelerator [and reportedly other features], up to 16GB of LPDDR4/LPDDR4X RAM [and] up to 256GB of storage." This sounds great, except that I was seriously underwhelmed by the Allwinner D1 in the DevTerm R-01, so the lack of CPU specs is not encouraging. There are also two distinct process nodes for the System-on-Module, 12nm for Pro and 28nm for Normal, so there may be a wide gulf between configurations. On the other hand, it does prominently claim to be upgradable, possibly by swapping out the modules. Strangely, it advertises itself with an ARM SC300 secure enclave, which seems a bit odd as well.

The other thing that's not encouraging, which Phoronix correctly calls bulls**t on, is the proliferation of buzzwords (NFTs! Web3! AR! BINGO!) in the press release. You can register your interest and how many units you want, though I'm understandably not thrilled about signing up for a pre-order from an unknown potentially sketchy company. If actual product emerges, I'll try to get one, but right now this seems more like just another revolution of the RISC-V hype machine.

Fedora 36 mini-mini-review on the Blackbird

I said that Fedora 36 was when I was going to jump ship from GNOME, since I'm not happy with the Adwaita-or-nothing ultimatum GNOME 42 poses squarely at heavy themers like me. The problem is what I'm going to jump ship to.

For the past couple weeks I've been experimenting on the Blackbird to see what window managers and desktop environments seem to work well with Fedora on ppc64le before I try to migrate my main Talos II workstation to whatever I end up picking. But I also know a few of you are itching to upgrade and waiting to see if there were any problems, and of course for those of you running a distro other than Fedora, Fedora's going to find problems earliest. So, this will be a mini-mini-review instead of what we traditionally do: what I've been testing on the Blackbird and how well it appears to work, keeping in mind that my Blackbird is a GPU-less machine using only the ASPEED BMC for graphics and a 4-core CPU with 16GB of RAM. I'd call it "low end," at least within the spectrum of practical OpenPOWER desktops.

The upgrade itself went fairly smoothly. You know the steps to this dance by now, but if you're new to the club, here's the fancy footwork:

dnf upgrade --refresh # upgrade prior system and DNF
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade # install upgrade plugin if not already done
dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=36 # download F36 packages
dnf system-upgrade reboot # reboot into upgrader

There were no broken packages and no upgrade glitches, at least on the Blackbird (the Talos II has rather more packages installed). Actually, I was surprised, because this is the release that finally fixes 128-bit long double after literally actual years and watching the PowerPC tracker in Redhat Bugzilla has been very busy of late. But, at least for the vanilla install on this Blackbird, there were no problems. In fact, I know the packages available have increased by at least one, and that one's a biggie. More in a second.

The upgrade was on a black screen again, but if you select the kernel manually from Petitboot you should be able to follow along. Alternatively, you can monitor on the serial port, or from a connected system viewing the serial console over the BMC's web server, or by logging into another VTY with CTRL-ALT-F2 or whatev as root and periodically issuing dnf system-upgrade log --number=-1 to watch log updates. I left it to upgrade while I ate lunch and came back to a clean reboot and a Fedora 36 login prompt.

Recall also that I no longer run a display manager directly on either of my running workstations because of past irregularities with gdm (other display managers may work, haven't tried); I boot directly into a text prompt and do a startx from there. If you are running gdm, lightdm or others, you can probably just select the session type on login and avoid some screwing around with ~/.xinitrc. But first, let's get the Wayland Wasteland out of the, uh, way with a quick XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland gnome-session and a heavy dose of antiemetics.

I was unable to appreciate really any difference, good or bad, with Wayland in F36 compared to F35. It still won't support resolutions greater than 1024x768 on BMC graphics, and speed was neither better nor worse; llvmpipe-based applications in particular seem to run roughly about the same as previously, which is to say, not great. My verdict is it's not a regression, which is itself a small victory, and that's as much as I did with Wayland. I then brought GNOME 42 up in X11.

On purpose my Blackbird doesn't have any GNOME themes and only the default extensions that Fedora provides as standard, so this is as vanilla as it gets. Tweaks still allows my Mac pointing memory to deal with closing and window buttons on the left. With the usual modeline 1080p works fine over HDMI in X11.

Fedora has various spins and other window managers available. I'm not going to do everything on the list, but I did a few. The first one I started with is Pantheon, the GNOME derivative from Elementary OS, mostly because it seemed more Mac-like to me. It turns out that the current release is unusually difficult to launch without a desktop manager; even gnome-session --builtin --session=pantheon just puts up a blank background. This is the current launcher I put in ~/.xinitrc:

#!/bin/csh

gala-daemon &
io.elementary.greeter-compositor &
io.elementary.greeter &
(sleep 1 && echo '12' && sleep 1 && echo '25' && \
 sleep 1 && echo '37' && sleep 1 && echo '50' && \
 sleep 1 && echo '62' && sleep 1 && echo '75' && \
 sleep 1 && echo '87' && sleep 1 && echo '100') | \
 zenity --progress --title="Autologin in progress" --text="" --no-cancel --auto-close &
sleep 5 && killall io.elementary.greeter
io.elementary.files-daemon &
io.elementary.wingpanel &
plank &
io.elementary.terminal &
exec gala --replace

It's really ugly, but it does properly load the theming — unless I start up the greeter, the GTK themes seem not to stick. However, I have to kill it so it doesn't hang around. This doesn't fix everything because apps don't seem to update in the dock and a few core components still don't start up right, and you can't log out to the shell without opening a terminal window and doing kill -9 -1, but it's good enough to do this:

And it's also good enough to do this:

Yes, sports fans, the proof that the long double issue is fixed is that MAME is now buildable and now even a standard package on ppc64le. Good job, Dan and folks!

Overall I found the Elementary-on-Fedora experience ... plausible. There are still some pitfalls and I'm not sure how many of them are the fault of my own configuration or something specific to ppc64le or various high-level deficiencies in the packages, but at least one person says it worked great in F35, so maybe I just suck.

Moving along, our next port of call was KDE Plasma. This basically works.

You can enable this either with something like switchdesk, which is a little antiquated, or simply putting exec startplasma-x11 into ~/.xinitrc (or, I suppose, startplasma-wayland, or these alternatives). I was able to get a theme that was good enough working. I know of others using it with Fedora, and it's probably the best secondary and supported option other than GNOME.

I don't have any screenshots of Xfce in F36 yet, but I was experimenting with it on the Talos II for F35, so I have high confidence that continues to work as well. The same is likely true for LXDE.

I also did a couple oddball WMs just for fun and for some new ideas. Other than wmx, which was possibly a little too bare, surprisingly these are more functional than you might think. The first was WindowMaker.

If WindowMaker looks like NeXTSTEP, it's no coincidence since it's a deliberate recreation of the interface. I'm very used to it since my SAIC Galaxy 1100 (a HP PA-RISC 9000/712 "Gecko" workstation in a MIL-SPEC portable case) runs NeXTSTEP 3.3. It's also stonking fast and has little baloney compared to most other window managers, but the interface is not designed to be particularly configurable other than individual menu options and cosmetic themes, and it's not very Mac OS X-like (because Rhapsody, Mac OS X and macOS aren't very NeXT-like). There is a Fedora package for it. Put exec wmaker into ~/.xinitrc.

The other oddball window manager I've played with so far is amiwm. Yes, this is an Amiga Workbench clone. There is no Fedora package for it; I built it from the source code on the Lysator FTP site (Lysator brings back memories since NannyMUD was single-handedly responsible for lowering my undergraduate grade point average freshman and sophomore years), though there seem to be a few patched-up versions on Github. In operation it's pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, screens, gadgets, requesters, Workbench menus and all:

And the damn thing not only works, it's even swifter than WindowMaker and does have the close button on the left. Maybe I've found a modern Amiga I do want. Anyway, the upgrade seems to be good. Go to it.

Firefox 101 on POWER

Firefox 101 is out, mostly of interest to developers but with a few liveability improvements. I suspect breakage of our LTO-PGO patch will be a regular occurrence and Fx101 indeed broke the diff again, but after updating rust, cargo and cbindgen the optimized build works fine with this revised PGO-LTO patch and the same .mozconfigs from Firefox 95.

I can't figure out where the bugs are in our POWER9 Ion JavaScript JIT implementation, though I still strongly suspect it's because we use sign-extended 32-bit ints. This is enough to pass the test suite but still breaks with the web. MIPS does too and we are strongly based on the MIPS port, but one wonders if MIPS suffers from the same issues, and I'm quite sure it's not tested anywhere near as well. As 32-bit arithmetic instructions aren't orthogonal in Power ISA this change would require some significant rearchitecting and I've just come off a really bad week at work, so I'll just try to pull up the current JIT to 102 so that those of you building the new ESR can continue to use Baseline Interpreter and Baseline Compiler, and then it will be time for more major surgery on the source code. You can help (please!).

Mini-review: The Clockwork Pi DevTerm R-01, or RISC-V on the go

This blog is unambiguously pro-Power ISA, not least because I'm a long-time PowerPC bigot to start with, but also I think OpenPOWER — POWER9 specifically — is currently the best option for a practical yet truly open computing platform: competitive performance, auditable stack, solid hardware, and good and steadily improving software support, so there. And that remains my official editorial position as I type this on my trusty Talos II.

But that doesn't mean I'm not other-RISC-curious, and RISC-V gets a lot of ink these days. I'll say for the record I believe much of that ink is hype: RISC-V is only a performance threat on the low end, there's a lot of sizzle and little steak in present hardware choices, and while the ISA may be open the actual implementations vary greatly on that point. I've observed that there are two main markets for OpenPOWER workstations, namely people who want to support alternatives to the x86-ARM duopoly, and those who want a truly libre auditable platform (with some natural overlap between these groups). RISC-V can scratch the itch of the first group, but it's arguable whether the ecosystem does so collectively for the second. That said, all hype machines, to borrow a cow-orker's trenchant expression, easily transform into self-licking ice cream cones and that sort of salivary momentum is why RISC-V is here to stay.

One other thing that RISC-V and OpenPOWER have in common, besides a royalty-free ISA, is that workstations are neither architecture's core market. POWER9 (and Power10 even more so) is still primarily a server and big-iron chip, and extant RISC-V cores mostly lurk in embedded applications (especially the "too cheap for MIPS" segment). But Raptor workstations at least have nerd awareness, while only the even-less-frequently-encountered HiFive Unmatched meets the definition of a RISC-V PC, and the others are just glorified evaluation boards. And even some people complain about the price of that.

For me, though, it wasn't the price that was the problem (I mean, I've got two T2 systems and a Raptor Blackbird and I'm saving my pennies for an Arctic Tern, so I'm all in on POWER); it was the form factor. I'm out of KVM slots and I have too many boxes around the office. If I was going to play with RISC-V as a use-it-like-a-computer user, it needed to be something that I could set up to mess with and tear it down to recover the desk space. Why, it could even be portable. That would be nice. There's no portable OpenPOWER option (yet?), so if there's a totable libre system out there other than those old bizarro Loongsons I'd love to rock one.

So when ClockworkPi announced they were making a RISC-V spin of their DevTerm "portable terminal," and for just US$240 to boot, I said, "Take my money. No, seriously, take it." So they took it, and yesterday about two months later it arrived, fresh from off the DHL boat from COVID-infested Hong Kong Hangzhou Manifest Tech Co Ltd (wait, did I buy a car or a computer?). Today I'll tell you about it.

Here's what this review isn't: in general it's not a review of the CPi DevTerm itself, though necessarily I'll mention some things of relevance. There are many of these reviews based on its previous iteration using aarch64 CPUs (mostly Cortex-A53 and A72) and the R-01 is literally just a DevTerm with a core module swap. Everything you'd like or hate about the form factor largely applies to both flavours, so refer to any of those existing reviews to determine whether you'd want a DevTerm at all regardless of what CPU's actually in it. Instead, I'm going to talk about this device specifically as a RISC-V general purpose computer, either if you'd just like a RISC-V machine to play with or to truly use as an alternative system on the road.

So, about that form factor. Although most people liken the DevTerm to the Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 (the most famous member of the Kyotronic 85 family), actually its design cues come more from the Model 100's close relative, the NEC PC-8201A. (Dig the control diamond: don't tell me that's a coincidence. For some reason CPi chose to make its codes separate from the cursor keys.) But I've used my PC-8201A on the road, for an entire month on Penang Island in Malaysia in 2000 where it was my only computer, and its full-size keyboard made it quite liveable. The DevTerm's a bit ... smaller — 65 percent regular size, to be exact. I have thin fingers (even when I was 45 pounds heavier) and wide hands, and I can sort of touch-type on it, or lift it in two hands and two-thumb-type with my hand width allowing my thumbs to just meet in the center of the keyboard. However, if you lack either of these attributes you may not enjoy the experience, though it has enough ports you could still potentially use it as a desktop system with external input devices instead. (The DevTerm keyboard is also not backlit, but I'm not going to ding it for that at this price point.)

Obligatory unboxing:

The box clearly advertises what's in it and, interestingly, the amount of RAM on the board (at 1GB this seems an odd thing to brag about).

Famously, it comes unassembled. Everything is in nice neat trays and it's actually rather fun to unpack. The plastic standoffs and holdfasts on sprues give it a delightful model-kit feel.

What's not included are a USB-C charger and two 18650 Li-Ion batteries. Neither of those is expensive or tough to find, but you'll need one or the other to actually power it up. There is also no paper for the thermal printer (!) it carries onboard, though any office supply store will have that too.

Case design, schematics and connectors are all GPL and on Github. The RISC-V "core," as CPi calls their CPU modules, sits on anti-static foam in one of the compartments:

CPi modules contain basically everything but storage and peripherals. In particular, the CPU/SoC, GPU (if present) and RAM are provisioned on a 200-pin SO-DIMM and can be swapped out (naturally you'd need to change the operating system at the same time, but that can be as simple as another microSD card). This is a strength of the design because if you don't like the experience with one CPU card (too slow? not compatible?), try another. CPi sells them inexpensively; if you already own an ARM DevTerm you can just buy the RISC-V module for US$29 and download the software. CPi kindly included a RISC-V build of their Ubuntu-based OS with this unit.

In this case, the CPU is an Allwinner D1, a single-core 1GHz RV64IMAFDCVU CPU based on the XuanTie C906 with on-board 2D graphics, DSP, audio/video, USB and SDIO. The DevTerm exposes HDMI, audio and USB external ports directly serviced by the D1. This is the same part in the Sipeed Nezha evaluation board and in a forthcoming SBC from Pine64. Impressively the RTL for the C906 core is open source and Apache-licensed, but unfortunately the rest of the design isn't: in particular the onboard graphics, DSP and peripheral controllers are only available as blobs, and only then if you register as a developer with Allwinner. For CPi's purposes this isn't a killer because their other CPU options are also blobularly blobtastic, but it's a minus in our book. The Hynix chip next to it is the RAM, a single gigabyte as stated. I cannot find any L2 cache at all, just the 32K L1 caches each for I+D.

Another minus is that the C906 and related cores, while they advertise vector instructions, predate the current RISC-V vector instruction standard. The instructions are similar but they are neither binary nor source compatible. On the other hand there's hardly anything supporting the current standard anyway, so this may not be a problem in the long run if the install base becomes large enough.

Getting out the clear orange scaffold and installing the screen, here's a size comparison against a DVD case to give you another idea about how big it is:

As you can see they're roughly the same size. If you'd find typing on a keyboard about half the size of a lengthwise DVD case difficult, the DevTerm is probably not for you. Anyway, let's finish putting it together.

Ta-daa! It took me about half an hour and it was pretty easy with no tools required. The manual goes step by step though they use a lot of part code shorthand that needed some flipping back and forth to check exactly what standoff, etc., I was supposed to be using where. While most of it can be taken apart as easily as it came together, some are glued stick-on components like the little on-board speakers and most notoriously the wireless antenna. I also didn't like the fact the flex cables are a little nervewracking to install and it took a little fiddling to convince myself they were properly seated (plus the video cable in particular has "SCREEN" silkscreened on it, but that end does not connect to the actual screen; it connects to the port marked "SCREEN" on the mainboard). Although it directs you to insert tiny screws to affix the core module to the board, there didn't seem to be any holes drilled on my board and the SO-DIMM socket seemed to hold the core just fine anyway. This might be something specific about the RISC-V module because the assembly manual is generic in scope. Finally, a pro-tip: it's easiest to put in the microSD card during assembly; it felt like I was inserting the card into an empty hole when I did it after, even though it did go in securely.

All that aside I give overall high marks to the fit and finish of the case, though it took me a little time to get the top to mate with the front lip of the bottom. And then there's those Frankensteiny Princess Leia earmuff closures on either side of the screen: they're cute and give it some personality, and they do hold the unit together, and I guess they're better than thumbscrews, but you almost expect them to have some sort of input device functionality and they don't. Missed opportunity, in my opinion. Plus, if you reopen the case the two halves of the closures come apart and have to be snapped back together, which is a little irritating. Once it is together, though, the case feels very sturdy. I liked how it felt in my hands; it didn't feel flimsy or fragile, and it was not excessively heavy even with the batteries in. Total weight according to my kitchen scale is 588g, or about a pound and a quarter.

Booting up! The manual warns it may take up to a minute, which wasn't too far off. The screen is very bright and legible, even considering the 1280x480 resolution is a little odd by modern standards (basically two VGA screens side by side), but it's very glossy and picks up hairs and fingerprints like a magnet. You probably want to have a microfibre cloth around in your bag for this thing.

And booted into CPi's bespoke Ubuntu variant, ClockworkOS. Despite the wiki (it's correct in the on-screen readme), the default username and password are both cpi.

Proof of uname:

ClockworkOS is very lightweight, and thank goodness it is for reasons we'll get into. There's no Wayland crap here; this is Xorg, as G-d Himself intended (especially because — as our frustrations with Wayland on our BMC-only 2D framebuffer Blackbird have proven — Wayland generally does not do well without a GPU even though it's doing better these days than it has). If the window manager looks throwback, it's because it's good old school twm. Fortunately the thumb trackball isn't too bad but there are key combinations for several marquee apps, which I found to be a thoughtful touch.

The status monitor on the right is also very handy, but you'll notice the clock is wrong, and the reason the clock is wrong is because it couldn't contact any time servers. Despite manually creating a network configuration for the house Wi-Fi, the DevTerm wouldn't connect from the front of the house (the Wi-Fi access point is in the server room in the middle) even though every other Wi-Fi capable device I own is able to do so. I was so perplexed by the range I ended up disassembling it again to check if I'd damaged the antenna or if it had come loose when I turned it over to put on the bottom, but the antenna was physically intact and the connector was snapped securely onto the mainboard. The only way it would connect was if it were closer to it. Various Wi-Fi issues have been reported with the DevTerm's relative GameShell, which appears to use the same sort of antenna, though I'm not sure if this is the same specific problem.

There are lots of fun pieces of software pre-installed like DOSBox and Chocolate Doom (and things like GIMP, Inkscape and Xfig if you want to do real work), so I fired up Doom because of course it plays Doom to get an idea of performance. The CPU immediately showed as pegged in the status monitor, which was not encouraging. Neither was gameplay:

I mean, the poor thing's even using a smaller viewport (by default: it started up that way) and the CPU is still straining at 99%. The framerate wasn't slide-show-slow and music and sound effects didn't seem to suffer (use Fn+the volume key to turn up the audio), but you could clearly see it painting each frame.

Web browsing was equally disappointing, but also for different reasons. Firefox on RISC-V is still a work in progress, although there was an Fx94 build at one point; there are patches for Chromium 104, though I wouldn't be caught dead using Chrome or anything derived from it, and neither Firefox nor Chromium are installed in any case. But it does have Qutebrowser, so let's try ... uh ...

Um, okay, how about ELinks?

This worked and might even be more appropriate for the display and CPU anyhow. It was very sprightly. Text for the win. I did go back to Qutebrowser and try QtWebKit despite the warning, and that does start, but ...

Besides the bad rendering, it was also just as slow as playing Doom was. At this point it would seem most appropriate to get an idea of how much oomph this thing actually has. For this we'll use CoreMark, since it's simple, easy to port and verifiable, and it's what many RISC-V vendors cite so this gives you comparison points. ClockworkPi kindly included development tools making it as simple as cloning it from Github and running make.

A couple benchmark results first, using default settings and reporting the highest score obtained: my NetBSD Macintosh IIci (25MHz Motorola 68030, no cache card) gets 8.3 iterations/second, my NetBSD Mac mini (1.5GHz PowerPC G4 7447A) gets 6073.9 iterations/second, my M1 MacBook Air gets 31713.3 iterations/second (single thread) and 171848.9 iterations/second (8 threads), and this dual-8 SMT-4 DD2.3 Raptor Talos II gets 14367.8 iterations/second (single thread) and 430078.6 iterations/second (64 threads). The D1 clocks in at ... 2232.5 iterations/second, just over a third of the performance of the G4 Mac mini, and I can run TenFourFox on that.

Another thing that performs badly on this device: shutting down. It takes literal, honest-to-goodness multiple minutes to power off cleanly. A surprise was the loud "click" it makes when it finally finishes. There doesn't appear to be an obvious way to make it sleep or suspend, though there is a screen saver which turns off the display after a period of inactivity.

I imagine some of these software problems will improve in later iterations, but as it stands this was my out-of-the-box user experience right now (in fairness CPi does say it is a "highly experimental" model, and actively steers new users away from it). I suppose you could try other distros but they may not support (fully) the DevTerm's onboard devices.

Now, something positive: battery life and power consumption seemed really good. The CPU may be weaksauce but it doesn't put a lot of power demand on the hardware either, nor is there a GPU to draw more juice, and the backlight can be easily changed with key combinations or terminal commands. And although there's a tiny little fan on the board I never heard it unless I put my ear right up against it and the device never seemed to get hot even when it was being held at its limits (which was a lot of the time). While the status monitor will show battery percentage (second from the bottom, above the uptime), cat /sys/class/power_supply/axp20x-battery/uevent will display a fuller, different set of statistics that don't always agree. Either way it's thrifty enough I'd estimate you can probably get eight, maybe 10 hours of runtime or more out of a full charge depending on load and battery quality. On the Kill-A-Watt the USB-C charger pulled between 11 and 14 watts depending on CPU load, though even with the CPU pegged in Chocolate Doom it only occasionally drew at the upper end of that range. Incidentally, since the batteries are removeable it's probably more efficient just to shut it down, take them out and stick them in a wall charger at the end of the day.

You might think after all the complaints I've made that I don't like this device. That is absolutely not the case; in fact, I've already become rather fond of it. I'll even go so far as to say that if you want an easy way to try RISC-V and want one you can use like a general purpose computer, and you're not already drunk on the Kool-Aid, then the DevTerm R-01 is your ticket. Clockwork Pi should be commended for offering it and charging less for it on top of that. Offered the choice between a HiFive Unmatched system and the DevTerm R-01, even considering the Unmatched will be somewhat more powerful, I'd still pick the DevTerm. Besides its obvious space and price advantages it's at least got enough grunt to serve as a terminal and do some very basic tasks and do it for hours on easily replaceable batteries, and it comes with sufficient developer tools out of the box that you can test your software on actually available RISC-V silicon today. Plus, with HDMI, USB and Bluetooth, you can just dock it as a desktop system if you don't need it to be mobile. While I certainly had my share of software problems, I suspect they are not at all unique to this particular implementation.

No, my objections here are primarily to the Allwinner D1. For as many claims as RISC-V's proponents make about openness, this chip isn't meaningfully so, and its underwhelming performance doesn't make it worth putting up with. I realize it's aggressively low-end but for crying out loud, it's getting its clock cleaned by a value-spec 2005 Power Mac (the U740 in the Unmatched gets by the G5, but by less than you'd think), and some software still doesn't work on the architecture yet — certainly more so than OpenPOWER. About all it's got going for it is that it can clearly do very well in a portable, power-constrained environment, and it's cheaper than ARM would be in that setting, yet despite such obvious shortcomings it and its progeny are the very chips here and in other upcoming products simply because they exist and survive. Is RISC-V going to be perennially bringing up the performance rear? (Hey, Raptor, want to make a souped-up Arctic Tern in this form factor?) Not for nothing but I don't see anyone selling those ballyhooed Micro Magic parts, and they may well be snake oil. Maybe some future RISC-V system will have sufficient performance, low power usage and full auditability to become a new and self-sustaining libre mobile option, but I'm having a hard time seeing any such CPU on the horizon.

The bottom line: the DevTerm R-01 is fun to play with and makes a stellar introductory RISC-V general purpose computer at a decent price that you can, for some values of "use," use. If you're already a DevTerm owner a measly US$29 for an R-01 module is a slam dunk, and even as a first-time buyer I feel my US$240 wasn't ill-spent. But after this first personal taste of RISC-V, I don't think OpenPOWER has much to worry about right now.

First production Kestrel and Arctic Terns? (OpenPOWER compute modules exist!)

Thanks, D, who's quicker on the draw than I am: this image popped up on the Raptor Wiki. Looks like Kestrel and Arctic Tern made it to full prototyping, and maybe on the way to production!

This image shows a Blackbird being brought up solely with the Kestrel soft BMC (the metadata says the ASPEED BMC was completely disabled), powered by a much more advanced design than the ECP5 card we saw in the last iteration, especially because this is now a set of custom boards. The PCIe carrier card has Ethernet and two HDMI ports to the left, and what looks like JTAG and serial (grey ribbon) on the right near the LEDs. The "hat" board has been incorporated into the carrier with the LPC, FSI (the black cables curling around out and back into frame go to the connector next to DIMM A1) and I2C signals, and a separate ribbon cable carries the TPM lines.

So far, this is mostly just moving components around. But new on this carrier card are two SO-DIMM style module slots, both populated with what looks like the same sort of card, though only the top one seems to be active. These modules are labeled "ARCTIC TERN ECP5 MODBMC (?) CARD AT1MB1 REV 1.01 (C)2022 RAPTOR COMPUTING SYSTEMS, LLC" (there was a rev 1.0? what did we miss?). This is clearly the CPU card on which the Kestrel soft BMC software runs. The BMC flash likely lives on these boards, but not the PNOR, which appears to be on flash chips on the carrier to the left of the LEDs. UPDATE: this thread says the modules have 1GB of DDR3 RAM each (!), and the CPU fan is directly connected to the carrier. They can be accessed remotely.

It really looks like it may be shipping in the very near future and I'm jazzed about how fast Kestrel reportedly can bring the system to power-ready. But there are two more exciting things about this: first, if this is laid out the way it appears to me to be, this means you can have two BMCs for a libre dual-monitor setup right out of the box, no extra PCI cards or firmware blobs required. (Suck it, Nvidia.) Second, and even more notable, this means that OpenPOWER compute modules may soon be a thing! Given Raptor Engineering, I'm sure hoping these will be sold for standalone projects, especially if the onboard Microwatt-core performance is competitive with RPi and other ARM boards. Maybe then the people whining about how much it costs to play with OpenPOWER will finally get something at a lower price point to play with (and then they can complain about that).

That said, we still don't know price or availability yet, and we don't know if there will be a way to add a Kestrel setup without using a precious PCIe slot (after all, the T2 Lite has only three, and the Blackbird just two; hopefully it can be configured to pull power from something else). But there's a lot of good things in this picture and we're looking forward to hearing more in what are no doubt soon-to-come official announcements.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and AlmaLinux 8.6

And more updates for Linux on OpenPOWER: RHEL 9 and AlmaLinux 8.6. AlmaLinux 8.6 continues on kernel 4.18 from version 8.5 with the usual bug fixes and security updates, plus updated streams for Perl, PHP and log4j and updated toolchains for gcc, LLVM, Rust and Go. ISOs are available. Currently your best bet on OpenPOWER for RHEL-style stability without the RHEL-style price, support for AlmaLinux 8.x is expected through at least 2029.

But hey, let's say in these inflationary times you think support contracts are a good investment. IBM-Red Hat's got you covered with RHEL 9, the first release based on CentOS Stream (version 9) instead of directly off Fedora, meaning this is actually F34 instead of the recently-released F36. This is particularly notable for ppc64le because you won't get the new long double support in F36 (it's "only" glibc 2.34), but then you won't have to deal with the GNOME 42 stupidity either. Fortunately application streams will cover keeping your toolchains current. If you're still on RHEL 8, though, you're still supported until at least 2030, and big-endian systems and others putting along on RHEL 7 will be supported through mid-2024 (with extended support planned for two years after that).

FreeBSD 13.1

FreeBSD 13.1 is now available, notable as it comes in both big-endian and little-endian flavours depending on how you swing (as well as 32-bit ports for Power Macs and the AmigaOne A1222). The biggest change in this version is that 13's shift to the PowerPC ELF ABIv2 makes it binary-incompatible with 12.x (so you may need to rebuild or relink; the release notes also suggest doing kldxref /boot/kernel after successful installation or upgrade). However, there are also fixes for the bootloader on the LE port, OpenSSL performance improvements, a serial console fix for the BE port, a fix for running FreeBSD with HPT superpages enabled on QEMU with TCG (if you're trying before you're buying), and — particularly of relevance to those of us on OpenPOWER hardware — a fix for the AST2500 console on bootup with recent OpenBMC firmware. It's a big update but one that makes OpenPOWER an even better citizen on FreeBSD (now if only NetBSD would get with the program, because at this point it's just embarrassing). Read the release notes, or download.

AOSC for old and new Power

Another choice in OpenPOWER distros, but with another choice for old-school 32-bit PowerPC, too. AOSC/OS (short for "Anthon Open Source Community") is an Debian (formerly OpenSUSE) derivative claiming to have a wide variety of packages and good port parity at the cost of larger space and a generally manual installation process. The desktop experience is KDE, though a server version is also available. Support for POWER8 and up is listed as "experimental" but is available for download, and most packages appear available to ppc64le.

However, another notable feature of AOSC/OS is its planned "retro" spin, including specific support for Power Macintosh, from the G3 through the G5 (the G5 using a 64-bit build). Unfortunately there isn't support yet for other PowerPC or bigendian systems, and the process is even clunkier since it requires another Linux installation as a trampoline, though the trampoline can be an old version. The retro spin also supports Loongson MIPS, Intel i486 and ARM going back to ARMv4; on desktop you have your choice of Trinity, a "spiritual successor" of KDE, or a "retro" X11 experience with IceWM. Currently these downloads are in the Alternative Downloads area.

Fedora 36 released

Fedora 36 is out. This distro is important to me personally as I run it on both my Raptors (my Talos II and my HTPC Blackbird), and even if you don't run it yourself it's a good early warning indicator of future platform issues because new support and features often hit Fedora first. However, I have mixed feelings about this milestone: we get LLVM 14 and gcc 12 and we're finally getting proper long doubles on ppc64le (as part of glibc 2.35), but it's also got GNOME 42, which means my customized, carefully curated to match my muscle memory Mac theme is screwed on GTK 4 apps (but in a worst of all worlds approach GTK 2/3 apps still use any custom theming while new hotness libadwaita apps don't). It might still be better than the alternatives, but it sucks, so in our upcoming usual mini-review (see my F35 one for an example) we might dive a bit into some of the alternative desktop environments offered on Fedora and see how they work on OpenPOWER — I'm thinking about Pantheon, myself. As usual, the review will come out in a week or so once any immediate breakers are identified and mirror sites have caught up. Meanwhile, here's the complete list of changes.

Firefox 100 on POWER

You know, it's not been a great weekend. Between striking out on some classic hardware projects, leaving printed circuit board corpses in my living room like some alternative universe fusion of William Gibson and Jeffrey Dahmer, one of the yard sprinkler valves has decided it will constantly water the hedge (a couple hundred bucks to fix) and I managed to re-injure my calf muscle sprinting to try to get a phone call (it went pop, I yelped and they hung up anyway). But Firefox is now at version 100, so there's that. Besides the pretty version window when you start it up, it has captions on picture-in-picture and various performance improvements.

Fx100 also broke our PGO-LTO gcc patches again; mach now needs to be patched to ignore how gcc captures profiling information or it will refuse to start a PGO build. This is rolled into the ensemble PGO-LTO patch, which works with the same .mozconfigs from FIrefox 95.

Between everything that's been going on and other projects I've wanted to pay attention to I don't think we're going to make the Fx102 ESR window for the POWER9 JIT. I'll still offer patches for 102ESR; you'll just have to apply them like you do for Firefox 91ESR. Meanwhile, I'll keep trying to get the last major bugs out as I have time, inclination and energy, but although I know people want this really badly, we need more eyes on the code than just me.

Tonight's game on OpenPOWER: Death Rally

Let's go for another shooter, but this time a top-down one. Essentially a murderous Super Sprint, Finnish developer Remedy's first game was the exuberantly zippy Death Rally, a decidedly socially hostile top-down racer with machine guns, bombs, spikes, sabotage, splattable spectators and cold hard cash. You can pick up missions for extra money (assassinations, drug running, the usual) or just exterminate your competition for a big bonus and plow the proceeds into a better chassis, a faster engine and better tires and armour. Apogee picked it up and added Duke Nukem for extra competition along with Remedy's cadre of obviously named parody racers (just try to guess who Bogus Bill is).

While Death Rally plays well in DOSBox, and even got an official freeware Windows port, there was never a Mac version (I had to play it on my beat-up old 486) and it was never open-sourced. A few attempts have been made to decompile it but the best of these is dRally, which is 64-bit compatible and compiles out of the box (just make -j24 or as you like for your number of cores) with SDL2 on Fedora 35. The old IPX multiplayer mode isn't supported but everything else mostly works.

Once it's compiled, you'll need a copy of the game assets, of course. I have the GT Interactive retail CD; I have not tried to extract it from the Steam version, 3D Realms no longer sells it directly, and I can't find it on GoG, so let's assume you've got a disc too. For that, just copy over all the *.BPA files (make sure they remain uppercase!) and the CINEM subdirectory from the CD. Create a file called CDROM.INI that simply has one line, ./CINEM (to tell it where the movies are). Start the game in that directory (I made a directory called assets that has everything in it and just symlinked ../drally_linux for convenience).

There are two bugs I ran across, neither serious. The DOS game alternates between 640x480 and a letterboxed (in SDL) 320x200 mode; the former is used for menus and the latter for videos and actual gameplay. On my Talos II in Fedora 35 with a WX7100 there's a lot of garbage in the letterboxed area which can be improved, though not completely eliminated, with this patch. Also, at least with my GT retail copy, if you let the game sit at the menu too long it will eventually go through its brag screens and crash when it hits one that doesn't seem to be in the archive. This patch wallpapers the problem.

Otherwise, I've been gunning down other cars all afternoon, and I haven't had to fire up DOSBox to do it. Get ready to go!