AlmaLinux 8.5 now stable on ppc64le

AlmaLinux, one of the "new" classic CentOSes after CentOS was reworked into the a-bit-more-fizzy CentOS Stream, has now updated their 8.5 beta release for ppc64le officially to stable status. This is probably your best bet if you want a no-cost RHEL-like experience on your OpenPOWER hardware with the stability reputation you used old-school CentOS for. Release notes and Live ISO images are available. Currently AlmaLinux 8 has a support commitment until at least 2029.

Vikings' OpenPOWER store is open

Rejoice, folks on the other side of the Atlantic: now you can buy the hardware you want from a source closer to home. Vikings' OpenPOWER store is now showing items in stock, including Raptor Talos II and T2 Lite full systems, T2 Lite boards, DD2.2 and DD2.3 POWER9 CPUs up to 22 and 18 cores respectively, and heatsinks and HSFs (and the hex driver needed to install them). The T2 and T2 Lite full systems in particular are different from what Raptor sells on this side of the pond: Raptor T2 systems currently come in Supermicro SC747 chasses with redundant 1620W PSUs but the Vikings flavour comes in Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 towers with a 650W PSU. Vikings T2 Lites start at €4158/US$4713 with VAT and full T2s at €5707/US$6467 with VAT, and both include 16GB of RAM and a single 4-core DD2.2 POWER9 with 3U HSF. You can of course add a GPU, 2nd CPU, RAM, SSD, bigger PSU, etc. to order, and if you're in Aachen, Germany, you can even drop by and pick it up. No word on Blackbird sales yet but we're sure that's on the way as the supply chain improves and Raptor is able to manufacture more, and in the meantime the T2 Lite remains a solid alternative. Note that while their OpenPOWER store is separate from their RYF products, the T2 and T2 Lite are still absolutely FSF RYF. Systems are available for order now. Let's support the companies that support us.

Chimera Linux test ISOs available for ppc64le

Chimera Linux, an upcoming Linux distro with a FreeBSD userland so you don't have to choose, now has downloadable test images for ppc64le and x86_64. The little-endian Power images, which we care about here obviously, are available both as straight-up console (which can be redirected to the onboard serial port) and GNOME-or-console flavours, and require a POWER8 or higher. The GNOME spins (screenshot at right) use Wayland by default but also allow X11 with a bootloader configuration. There's still a lot in flux, but it's impressive the OS is this far along, and certainly offers something more substantial to the Power community than the usual distro dance. For more info, see the FAQ, or download ISO images from the download page.

Brief status update on the POWER9 JavaScript JIT

% obj/dist/bin/js --baseline-eager --ion-offthread-compile=off --regexp-warmup-threshold=0 -e 'var i,j=0;for(i=0;i<100;i++){j+=j+i;}print(j)'
1.2676506002282294e+30
% obj/dist/bin/js --ion-eager --ion-offthread-compile=off --regexp-warmup-threshold=0 -e 'var i,j=0;for(i=0;i<100;i++){j+=j+i;}print(j)'
1.2676506002282294e+30

Told you it was a productive holiday weekend. Onward to conquering the test suite.

Skiboot support lands in Coreboot

Coreboot, the lightweight open-source extensible firmware project, can now load the intermediate boot stage Skiboot as a payload. This should now make POWER8 and POWER9 (through QEMU) a functioning "board." The next step, per consultants 3mdeb on Twitter (and sponsor Insurgo), is to rebase and push actual hardware support for the Talos II (and T2 Lite). If all goes as planned, this means a potential (and potentially faster) replacement for Hostboot, which is the lower-level portion that launches Skiboot and eventually Petitboot. Note that this development is distinct from Arctic Tern, which aims to build "a better BMC" with its own firmware at a lower level than Hostboot or Coreboot. If POWER9 Coreboot can pull off a faster start time, combined with Arctic Tern it would be an even bigger jump for useability, so we look forward to seeing actual firmware available people can try. 3mdeb is looking for beta testers.

Firefox 97 on POWER

Firefox 97 is out. Because printing to PostScript was useful, Mozilla has removed it (though at least right now you can still print to PDF, and you can still print to PostScript printers, just not a file). More helpfully, there are various CSS, SVG and DOM improvements.

It was previously reported that WebRTC was broken on OpenPOWER under Fx96, which looks like bug 1738445 (a replay of bug 1465274, which I upstreamed four years ago). I don't use WebRTC myself due to the way my internal network is configured, so don't consider this in any way an attestation of functionality, but I was able to build Firefox 97 unmodified with the .mozconfigs and LTO-PGO patch from Firefox 95. Although I have an old build of gn, I tested whether that was the necessary piece by pulling that line out of the configuration, and it still built — at least under gcc. I did do a test clang build (removing the compiler export lines and removing forcing linkage with bfd), and that did fail to build (with or without gn), and --disable-webrtc along with this change to NSS did allow it to compile. However, when started up with ./mach run, the clang build could browse but complained the history and places databases were corrupt and about:support was messed up. Using the same profile with a gcc build was fine. IDK.

I do need to upstream some changes to that section of NSS. Besides fixing the bad #if (I agree with the analysis it only works on gcc by happy accident), it wasn't really written for anything past POWER4 or so. In fact, we could probably just assume that any ppc64le has a 128-byte cache line and shortcut the logic entirely (AFAIK this would just be POWER8, POWER9 and Power10), and just keep the code only on big-endian to still support the PowerPC 970. Tell me the weird edge case or unusual Power CPU this would break in the comments before I get a round tuit.

I've had a bad week of work, but I'm looking forward to making more progress on the test suite and continuing the OpenPOWER JIT development over the long holiday weekend here in the USA. Remember: I don't have a life so you don't have to.