Raptor's Blackbird micro-ATX POWER9 System Is Ready To Take Flight This Week

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raptor's Blackbird micro-ATX POWER9 System Is Ready To Take Flight This Week

The much anticipated Raptor Blackbird is set to begin shipping over the days ahead. Blackbird is the lower-cost (compared to the Talos II Secure Workstation) micro-ATX motherboard for IBM POWER9 systems and offers open-source firmware as currently one of the most open, high-performance systems available...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raptor-Blackbird-Shipping

[milkylainen]

Super interesting. Any chance Raptor boards will expose the Power CPUs NvLink in the future?
I'd sell my kingdom and all my horses for playing with an exposed NvLink + an Open source FPGA NvLink at the other end.

[MPC7500]

Don't forget to select a heatsink for the 4-core bundle

[cb88]

Super interesting. Any chance Raptor boards will expose the Power CPUs NvLink in the future?
I'd sell my kingdom and all my horses for playing with an exposed NvLink + an Open source FPGA NvLink at the other end.

NVlink is a proprietary protocol... you'd wan to run OpenCAPI instead over the Blue Links.

[andyprough]

Michael - last time you benchmarked the Talos II, you were able to run Debian 9.7, Debian Buster, Ubuntu 18.10, and Ubuntu 19.04 on all the tests, and openSUSE Tumbleweed on some of the tests. I've read that Fedora may have dropped their work on Power9, but not sure. Other than Gentoo, are there any distros different from your past efforts that you think might run on the Blackbird?

Obviously, this is an extremely exciting step forward for Power9, especially with the built-in HDMI and the PCIe. I'm assuming you'll be trying out a variety of video cards at some point?

[Dawn]

Michael - last time you benchmarked the Talos II, you were able to run Debian 9.7, Debian Buster, Ubuntu 18.10, and Ubuntu 19.04 on all the tests, and openSUSE Tumbleweed on some of the tests. I've read that Fedora may have dropped their work on Power9, but not sure. Other than Gentoo, are there any distros different from your past efforts that you think might run on the Blackbird?

Obviously, this is an extremely exciting step forward for Power9, especially with the built-in HDMI and the PCIe. I'm assuming you'll be trying out a variety of video cards at some point?

Where did you hear Fedora dropped Power9?

[Michael]

Michael - last time you benchmarked the Talos II, you were able to run Debian 9.7, Debian Buster, Ubuntu 18.10, and Ubuntu 19.04 on all the tests, and openSUSE Tumbleweed on some of the tests. I've read that Fedora may have dropped their work on Power9, but not sure. Other than Gentoo, are there any distros different from your past efforts that you think might run on the Blackbird?

Obviously, this is an extremely exciting step forward for Power9, especially with the built-in HDMI and the PCIe. I'm assuming you'll be trying out a variety of video cards at some point?

Supported operating systems are listed @ https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Opera...atibility_List

Yes, will try different GPUs/drivers with time.

[MPC7500]

Supported operating systems are listed @ https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Opera...atibility_List

Yes, will try different GPUs/drivers with time.

Could you also test:
AlpineLinux: https://alpinelinux.org
ArchLinux: https://archlinuxpower.org
CentOS: https://www.centos.org

[andyprough]

Where did you hear Fedora dropped Power9?

Reading through a forum, but I think that's wrong, I think Fedora supports it since Fedora 28. Michael had trouble with it on his last Raptor Talos II review, so did not include it.

[Min1123]

You can unofficially look at Fedora as an upstream or even testing/development ground for RHEL. Since RHEL has and will continue to have support for POWER8 and POWER9 (Little Endian support), Fedora will continue to have it as well.