Raptor's Blackbird Arrives As The Most Open-Source Yet Fast Desktop System

[Gerk]

stan Firefox works on powerpc it just has no JIT but with the beast that the machine is, it does not bother browsing that much if you have NoScript installed. On the other hand, Chromium just works and has JIT, it just is not upstreamed yet because Google wont accept/review the patches for what it appears to be a political de-prioritization. Someone maintains an ungoogled-chromium ppc fork at https://gitlab.com/lle-bout/ungoogled-chromium

[andyprough]

The specs look great! All the things that one can do with 128 GB max ram! However, it's a bummer than no web browser (Firefox or Chromium) works on PowerPC. Several bugs in Firefox have been open for almost a year:

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Porting/Firefox

Is there no-one smart enough to fix these handful of bugs? I mean come on, this should be a walk in the park for the chip maker IBM or its subsidiary, Red Hat!

You sure it doesn't have any web browsers? Because Fedora, openSUSE, & Debian have entire distros for it.

If you need to, you can build Firefox Nightly on it: https://www.talospace.com/2019/05/fi...-on-power.html
Instructions for building are on the bottom of the wiki page you linked to.

[oiaohm]

According to people I've spoken to on #talos-workstation running BE, they are using older GPU's successfully on BE.

True but those old drivers have had the patches. Any updates to the old drivers could break it again. The newer amdgpu driver and userspace really has not been audited for BE compatibility in the CPU run code. So it not that it cannot be made work its more likely you will uncover a stack of bugs that need fixing and the upstream will accept the patches. Its that someone will need to put in the time just like it has been on older drivers. Someone need to keep on putting in the time on the older drivers when there are fixes done so something little endian dependant cpu side does not sneak though.

The GPU side no matter the age of ATI/AMD cards is always little endian.

[Min1123]

Unrelated note: When will my BlackBird pre-order ship?!

I've been wondering/following this question for quite a long time. I preordered in December. I'm quite anxious to have my modern PPC to work with again. I started PPC with a Pegasos 1 Motherboard with a G3 chip and an awful RAM bug (the northbridge couldn't do more than 256MiB of RAM, everything above it got corrupted), then got a PPC iBook G4 12" that I loved for as long as it lasted, then a G5 dual socket cheese grater. I ran PPC Linux on all of them, and with Apple's Broadcom WiFi hardware, that was a mess of things like NDISWrapper, but it was such a smooth experience.

I've been looking forward to running on something that doesn't have a bunch of firmware they hold closed to themselves and to more PPC for a long time, and it's almost here . . . I hope.

[stan]

You sure it doesn't have any web browsers? Because Fedora, openSUSE, & Debian have entire distros for it.

If you need to, you can build Firefox Nightly on it: https://www.talospace.com/2019/05/fi...-on-power.html
Instructions for building are on the bottom of the wiki page you linked to.

Thanks for the link! I'm glad Firefox is working and there are multiple distros already working on the Rapot Blackbird and Talos computers. Great Job and Thanks to RaptorCS and IBM for making the system fully open source and with such high specs! Now all we need is for FSF to certify them as fully free systems and give them publicity through that.

BTW: Is the USB 3 (XHCI) firmware really open source in the Blackbird and Talos systems? I thought that was a roadblock for Coreboot, because unlike USB 1 and 2, the controller itself has firmware running on it in USB 3.

[starshipeleven]

Thanks for the link! I'm glad Firefox is working and there are multiple distros already working on the Rapot Blackbird and Talos computers.

The distros for PowerPC exist because they are supposed to run on IBM server stuff.

RHEL, SLES and Ubuntu do support modern Power systems. Then again I don't know how well-tested and working are programs that aren't used on a server.

[starshipeleven]

BTW: Is the USB 3 (XHCI) firmware really open source in the Blackbird and Talos systems?

They used a controller that "does not have firmware". (most likely has an internal ROM with it)

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird

from the datasheet https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/sllse76m/sllse76m.pdf

Requires No External Flash for Default Configuration
– Optional Serial EEPROM for Custom Configuration

[curaga]

"Quick update on pre-order shipments....we're still processing Blackbird batches as they arrive from manufacturing, first ordered, first served. We hope to have the pre-order shipments completed by June 7."

[darkbasic]

I'm waiting for mine, but I have something to ask in the meantime: could you please test with both the mitigations on and off?
I've heard that Talos has stricter defaults than x86 which could impact performance harder.

[edwaleni]

For those asking about browsers, they exist but will not play certain media types due to lack of PPC support for certain codecs.

Talos has been working with IBM on getting Chromium ported with codec support. See the Talos website for details.