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

[phoronix]

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

In hoping to improve the situation for running Windows programs on POWER9 hardware under Linux, Raptor Engineering has contributed a set of patches so far for bringing PowerPC 64-bit little endian support to Wine's library. This is great news if you are a current Talos II customer or hoping to get one of the lower-priced POWER9 Blackbird systems from the company this year...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raptor-Improving-POWER-Wine

[cybertraveler]

Those Raptor guys are a force of nature.

I really hope their hardware gets commercially popular, so that they get a big enough income required to sustain and grow their operation.

These could be the people that lay the foundation for a practical, high-performance, open hardware future, free from secret/covert chips running unknown code with unknown vulnerabilities at the lowest levels of our systems.

If they got popular it may even be enough to force Intel and AMD to change their ways.

[MastaG]

Those Raptor guys are a force of nature.

I really hope their hardware gets commercially popular, so that they get a big enough income required to sustain and grow their operation.

These could be the people that lay the foundation for a practical, high-performance, open hardware future, free from secret/covert chips running unknown code with unknown vulnerabilities at the lowest levels of our systems.

If they got popular it may even be enough to force Intel and AMD to change their ways.

+1000

[darkbasic]

These could be the people that lay the foundation for a practical, high-performance, open hardware future, free from secret/covert chips running unknown code with unknown vulnerabilities at the lowest levels of our systems.

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.

[Djhg2000]

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.

Several points to make here:

1. Open source GPUs exist, competitive open source GPUs do not
2. Aside from the GPU firmware you can get a completely free software stack with AMDGPU
3. Given the track record of Intel, their dedicated GPU will most likely require a proprietary firmware

[GI_Jack]

Those Raptor guys are a force of nature.

I really hope their hardware gets commercially popular, so that they get a big enough income required to sustain and grow their operation.

These could be the people that lay the foundation for a practical, high-performance, open hardware future, free from secret/covert chips running unknown code with unknown vulnerabilities at the lowest levels of our systems.

If they got popular it may even be enough to force Intel and AMD to change their ways.

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.

[GI_Jack]

Several points to make here:

1. Open source GPUs exist, competitive open source GPUs do not
2. Given the track record of Intel, their dedicated GPU will most likely require a proprietary firmware

* 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.
* 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.

[darkbasic]

[*]Aside from the GPU firmware you can get a completely free software stack with AMDGPU

Aside from the Intel Management Engine you can get a completely free software stack with Intel CPUs

[cynical]

I don't really need x86 since I don't game anymore and everything I use is open-source, but man they just make it even more attractive to switch. I'm definitely getting a POWER system in the future. I like how they are actively improving the ecosystem; by the time I get one, things should be fairly mature.

[numacross]

* 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.

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