Debian 13 is out , which like most other architectures is one of the big three distros on ppc64le (which Debian calls ppc64el in accordanc...| www.talospace.com
As promised here's my periodic mini-review after upgrading both our Blackbird and Talos II systems to Fedora 31, the most current release ,...| www.talospace.com
The free computing frontier| www.talospace.com
IBM made the date official: Power11 launches July 25 , with the 32 AI-core Spyre Accelerator expected to follow in the fourth quarter. IB...| www.talospace.com
IBM is announcing their new z17 mainframe , based on the Telum II (see our notes on the original Telum CPU). IBM first announced the Telum ...| www.talospace.com
A great announcement today from the 9front team: ongoing support for ppc64 . Today's release finally brings the groundbreaking Plan 9 op...| www.talospace.com
Let's call it a #ShowUsYourTalos moment. This video from Savoir Technologies shows off their own Blackbird system, carrying an 8-core POW...| www.talospace.com
It's been awhile since we dropped in on Microwatt , the OpenPOWER VHDL softcore. Microwatt now runs on multiple FPGA boards or can be run ...| www.talospace.com
It's Fedora upgrade time again! And in the same way I preface all these mini-reviews ( see our last for Fedora 40 ), Fedora was one of the f...| www.talospace.com
There weren't that many Common Hardware Reference Platform PowerPC systems anyway, but if you have one of them (notably systems like IBM's ...| www.talospace.com
I updated the Baseline JIT patches to apply against Firefox 128ESR, though if you use the Mercurial rebase extension (and you should), it will rebase automatically and only one file had to be merged — which it did for me also. Nevertheless, everything is up to date against tip again, and this patchset works fine for both Firefox and Thunderbird. I kept the fix for bug 1912623 because I think Mozilla's fix in bug 1909204 is wrong (or at least suboptimal) and this is faster on systems without...| Talospace
Just a quick note that Fedora 41 is out , the standard Linux distro we use here on our two Raptor systems. Based on kernel 6.11, he big upda...| www.talospace.com
The issues with Ion and Wasm in OpenPower Firefox notwithstanding, the Baseline JIT works well in Firefox ESR128, and many of you use it (in...| www.talospace.com
[Here's a guest post from taylor.fish on their porting work on music and audio software. I thought it made a good tutorial on porting and also is a great way to show off the diverse things people are doing on OpenPower. Like all guest and first-party posts on Talospace, this article remains the property of the original author and may be distributed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. -- Ed.] For the past five years, I’ve used a Blackbird as my primary computing device. Prior to that I used x86 systems flas...| Talospace
It's been a long hot summer at $DAYJOB and I haven't had much time for much of anything, but I got granted some time this week to take care ...| www.talospace.com
It appears that some of the issues observed by me and others with Chromium on Fedora ppc64le may in fact be due to an incomplete patch set...| www.talospace.com
Many of you have heard of the Framework laptop , a modular system that you can DIY from a mainboard and parts or purchase fully assembled. T...| www.talospace.com
Are you really desperate to have your own Power10 (libre issues notwithstanding) while we wait for S1? IBM historically releases "little" versions of their servers after the launch systems have exhausted their novelty and now it's time for this generation's. If you've got 2Us in your rack, a wad of money in your wallet and an IBM salesdroid in your Rolodex, in about a month the Power S1012 could be yours. Based on the size of the board, no one would mistake this for a Blackbird, yet it's pret...| Talospace
Rocky Linux 9.4 is out , based on RHEL 9.4 , but, you know, free. (Note that Rocky Linux 8.9 doesn't come in a ppc64le version, so Rocky 9....| www.talospace.com
The original PowerPC 400-series embedded chips are no longer supported in the Linux kernel as of today. Despite its prior design wins in many set top boxes, service processors and network equipment, there are no known current consumers of the code and no maintainers. The change affects the 401, 403 and 405, but in case you were worried the change is irrelevant to the embedded PowerPC 405 variant used as an on-chip controller for OpenPOWER, since it runs the Self-Boot Engine and not mainline L...| Talospace
This is Chromium running on GNOME in Xorg in Fedora 40 on the Talos II. I think it says it all, really. Now, I won't mince words here: I ...| www.talospace.com
Fedora 40 is now out, the most current release that I personally use on my own Talos II and Blackbird systems. (This means that Fedora 38 w...| www.talospace.com
Raptor has released firmware updates for Talos II and Blackbird (version 2.10). I'm still between residences but I intend to install this ...| www.talospace.com
OpenBSD 7.5 is out with multiple kernel and SMP improvements (we love SMP improvements on our multicore beasts), more hardware support, and...| www.talospace.com
Firefox 124 is out , featuring additional platform improvements and some other updates not highly relevant to us. This release needs an upd...| www.talospace.com
Finally getting back towards something approaching current. Firefox 123 is out , adding platform improvements , off-main-thread canvas and t...| www.talospace.com
A number of people have alerted me to some new activity around Power11 in the Linux kernel, such as this commit and a PVR (processor vers...| www.talospace.com
Right now during our relocation I'm not always in the same ZIP code as my T2, but we've still got to keep it up to date. To that end Firefox...| www.talospace.com
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays: what a long strange trip it's been trying to get to this point, between trying to get a place to live ...| www.talospace.com
I'd like to first start out by saying I've been aware of new developments but made certain promises to keep my mouth shut until all the pa...| www.talospace.com
It's been kind of a wild ride getting the Talos II and the Blackbird upgraded to Fedora 37, but we're there, so it's finally time for a mi...| www.talospace.com
Colourful, no? But it's true. I've not been able to write up my Fedora 37 experience, nor upgrade Firefox (nor do further work on the JIT)...| www.talospace.com