Raptor Engineering Helping To Improve POWER Support In Wine, Eyes Hangover

[Vistaus]

I hope so, but reality is we still lack open source GPUs as of today. Hopefully Intel's discrete GPUs will have open source firmware.

An open source GPU is not the same as a GPU with open source firmware, so which of the two are you referring to?

[Vistaus]

I think he meant the firmware situation: newer generations of Intel GPUs require firmware for certain parts to work.

I have Kaby Lake R which, according to your wiki article, should be affected by this, but my system runs fine. At least on Solus (haven't tried Arch on this system).

[numacross]

I have Kaby Lake R which, according to your wiki article, should be affected by this, but my system runs fine. At least on Solus (haven't tried Arch on this system).

It depends on your definition of "fine". According to Intel's documentation the firmwares enable more features/performance and power saving technologies.

It's probably a less severe version of the nouveau nVidia driver situation - it will "work" but without reclocking so you get terrible performance, for example.

[Djhg2000]

* Open source GPUs exist on git repositories in verilog. Or at least as Open Source chips. A full working usable Open Source video card does not exist. Not on any tier. You cannot buy/build/obtain one.

My point exactly. You'd need to spend a ridiculous amount of money just get a card, and even then it wouldn't keep up with any of the cards you can buy at your local computer store.

* Intel's track record with Linux in more recent years has been very good. Their iGPUs are fully support in linux, with factory maintained inline FOSS drivers. As is all their other hardware.

That's just on the driver side, their firmware is closed source.

[Min1123]

A POWER8 port of RH, and then even if not dirrect support, some expertly written patches and optimizations for POWER.

No need to port RHEL to POWER, it's already there, it just costs more. So is Fedora although not "Workstation" and not on the main page (it's secondary right now) https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fed...r/ppc64le/iso/.

[jacob]

Its entirely possible. Now that IBM owns redhat, giving a little support to raptor would give a lot of great publicity to IBM. A POWER8 port of RH, and then even if not dirrect support, some expertly written patches and optimizations for POWER.

Or fuck, buy raptor outright and get back in the desktop game. Chances are low, but entirely possible.

I would not say chances are low, rather, fortunately the risks are low. An indie manufacturer like Raptor dedicated to building FOSS-oriented hardware is what the community needs. If IBM stepped in, chances are they would try to turn it into a new PS/2, with no clear goal other than making it proprietary.

Remember, IBM aren't the "good guys". They never were.

[hiryu]

Not complaining... But I'm not sure I really understand the point of this... So we can slowly run Windows apps on POWER? Is this so we can have a decent and functional browser on POWER?

I have a Talos II already, and I pre-ordered the BlackBird (as I'm so happy with the Talos II)... But I'm not sure what I'd use this for. Maybe I'll run original Starcraft on POWER for for my own amusement.

[edwaleni]

Seeing Windows apps run on POWER9 would definitely be a throwback. The POWER 615 had a 486SLC core fabbed in and was designed to run OS/2 WOW code.

Its entirely possible. Now that IBM owns redhat, giving a little support to raptor would give a lot of great publicity to IBM. A POWER8 port of RH, and then even if not dirrect support, some expertly written patches and optimizations for POWER.

Or f buy raptor outright and get back in the desktop game. Chances are low, but entirely possible.

RedHat 8 Beta for PPC64 LE is available.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8-beta/

1. Open source GPUs exist, competitive open source GPUs do not

See Michael's write up on the Libre Graphics effort using RISC-V and Vulkan.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libre-GPU-RISC-V-Vulkan

[mzs.112000]

I wonder if this could lead to being able to run Windows apps on G5 PowerMacs? Those are based on POWER4 architecture. And it could keep them useful for longer....

[ZeroPointEnergy]

So ironically proprietary Linux "native" games will not run but win32 will?