Google Chrome/Chromium Begins Landing POWER PPC64LE Patches

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Chrome/Chromium Begins Landing POWER PPC64LE Patches

Raptor Computing Systems spent a lot of time last year working on Chrome's PPC64LE support to enable Google's web browser to run on the latest IBM POWER processors. Google was sitting on these patches without any action for months but finally they are beginning to be accepted upstream...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chrome-POWER-Landing

[-MacNuke-]

Google was sitting on these patches without any action for months

Pretty normal for the Chromium Team at Google when it comes to Linux. Look at the VAAPI patches. They are not accepting them for years not even behind a feature flag (except for ChromeOS) because whatever, f*** y** I guess. Distributions became so annoyed that they patch VAAPI in anyways.

[schmidtbag]

Pretty normal for the Chromium Team at Google when it comes to Linux. Look at the VAAPI patches. They are not accepting them for years not even behind a feature flag (except for ChromeOS) because whatever, f*** y** I guess. Distributions became so annoyed that they patch VAAPI in anyways.

Thanks for censoring the word "you"; my Christian eyes can only handle so much blasphemy
On a serious note though, their priorities are pretty annoying, though, I'm not sure how wrong they are in some of their decisions. When it comes to PPC64, I can't really blame them for being so slow to accept patches. Linux desktop users by themselves are relatively niche, and desktop PPC64 users are even harder to come by, regardless of what OS they use. Of course, Raptor is trying to change this (and to that I say, good for them) but I wouldn't be surprised if the Chromium team is busy enough as-is just making sure all of the patches coming from the Windows version don't cause regressions.

All that being said, if Chrome/Chromium spent less time implementing bloated features nobody asked for, they could spend more time with things people actually care about like optimizations, architecture-specific patches, and video acceleration.

[ms178]

I can't decide yet what will happen sooner, Google accepting the VAAPI patches or POWER9 gaining traction in the consumer desktop segment again.

[FireBurn]

I can't decide yet what will happen sooner, Google accepting the VAAPI patches or POWER9 gaining traction in the consumer desktop segment again.

Probably the later

[mzs.112000]

I can't decide yet what will happen sooner, Google accepting the VAAPI patches or POWER9 gaining traction in the consumer desktop segment again.

The problem is, POWER9 never had traction in the consumer desktop segment. PowerMac's did, but their G5/970MP CPU was POWER4-based.
Of course, PowerMacs are still the only way to get an affordable POWER development or desktop system, and that's unfortunate because there are no modern GPU's for them(CPU's are still powerful enough to be a reasonable desktop system).

I am thinking about getting one, and maybe it can be used to compile packages for POWER4 Linux. In fact, I wonder how much work it would be to compile Ubuntu 18.04 for PowerPC(I am thinking, compile the packages needed for a base 18.04 install, and then maybe the top 100 extra packages)

[edwaleni]

I don't think its laziness on Google's part, its just a matter of priorities. And the datacenter POWER systems are seriously not needing anything from Chromium.

When Mozilla stopped OS/2 builds, a team forked it into Warpzilla and so it continues.

The important thing for Chrome on PPC64 LE desktop is getting the codec support along with the vector stuff finished.

[darkbasic]

The problem is, POWER9 never had traction in the consumer desktop segment. PowerMac's did, but their G5/970MP CPU was POWER4-based.
Of course, PowerMacs are still the only way to get an affordable POWER development or desktop system, and that's unfortunate because there are no modern GPU's for them(CPU's are still powerful enough to be a reasonable desktop system).

I am thinking about getting one, and maybe it can be used to compile packages for POWER4 Linux. In fact, I wonder how much work it would be to compile Ubuntu 18.04 for PowerPC(I am thinking, compile the packages needed for a base 18.04 install, and then maybe the top 100 extra packages)

I got my hands on a old PowerMac and I tried to use Gentoo on it. For nowadays standards it's waaay slower than you could imagine, so I don't suggest you to buy one. I couldn't make anything useful out of it.

[schmidtbag]

I got my hands on a old PowerMac and I tried to use Gentoo on it. For nowadays standards it's waaay slower than you could imagine, so I don't suggest you to buy one. I couldn't make anything useful out of it.

Haha I could imagine. Pentium 4 is when Intel started to outperform PPC and by around 2004, P4s were already feeling slow.

[Charlie68]

Pretty normal for the Chromium Team at Google when it comes to Linux. Look at the VAAPI patches. They are not accepting them for years not even behind a feature flag (except for ChromeOS) because whatever, f*** y** I guess. Distributions became so annoyed that they patch VAAPI in anyways.

In openSUSE, VAAPI hardware acceleration in Chromium is enabled by default and works well on my PCs.