FSF To Look At RYF Certification For The POWER9 Talos II

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FSF To Look At RYF Certification For The POWER9 Talos II

Last month Raptor Engineering announced the Talos II POWER9-powered workstation that is cheaper than the original Talos Workstation while still aiming to be very free software friendly. The Free Software Foundation will be exploring the possibility of "Respect Your Freedom" certification on this hardware when it's ready to ship...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Talos-2-FSF-RYF-Possible

[R41N3R]

Interesting system, but actually too expensive for me. Sure I understand they had high development costs.

[PluMGMK]

Interesting system, but actually too expensive for me. Sure I understand they had high development costs.

Pretty much this.

I wonder if this could be a very good counter-example to demonstrate the mistake of mixing up "free speech" with "free beer"…

[FireBurn]

How did they get round the graphics issue again? Was it an old nVidia card?

[starshipeleven]

How did they get round the graphics issue again? Was it an old nVidia card?

They use the shitty iGPU used by the BMC, which is from ASpeed (fully opensourced, also the BMC firmware is open, and a derivative of Facebook's OpenBMC initiative where ASpeed contributed code and info to work on their hardware).

[Wilfred]

They use the shitty iGPU used by the BMC, which is from ASpeed (fully opensourced, also the BMC firmware is open, and a derivative of Facebook's OpenBMC initiative where ASpeed contributed code and info to work on their hardware).

Are there any benchmarks of this? Can it smoothly run Gnome Wayland on two UHD screens?

[starshipeleven]

Are there any benchmarks of this? Can it smoothly run Gnome Wayland on two UHD screens?

No. The AST2500 (the name I was told at the times of the kickstarter) is a chip used to remote-control a server.

Its GPU component supports a single 1920x1200 screen and provides 2D acceleration only (so no GNOME/KDE).
https://www.aspeedtech.com/products....ath=20&rId=440

On the Talos site they state that their board has a single VGA port.

afaik there is no known FSF-approvable GPU that supports 2 UHD screens.

[hiryu]

The AST2500 is built in, but isn't the only option. They also offer a "Radeon Pro WX7100 Workstation Graphics". You can see it as an option when you go to pre-order and configure a system. I'm sure proprietary firmware is needed there, however.

Nvidia also makes closed drivers for PPC64LE it looks like.

On a related note, I've pre-ordered one. Not for use as a desktop though. I'm going to use mine as a server.

[torsionbar28]

afaik there is no known FSF-approvable GPU that supports 2 UHD screens.

There is so much IP in a modern GPU's firmware that I don't think we will ever see FSF-approved GPU (with competitive specifications). For the 2 UHD screens, the best we can do is a Matrox card, which has closed firmware, but at least its static, no blobs.

[chithanh]

afaik there is no known FSF-approvable GPU that supports 2 UHD screens.

NVidia Kepler cards with two DisplayPort outputs should do.

A few Geforce cards like the MSI Gaming ITX 760 have two (mini-)DisplayPort outputs, as do a number of Quadro cards.