This was presented by Dan Horák (Red Hat) at OpenPOWER summit EU 2019. The original one is uploaded at: https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/opeu19/d2/op-eu-2019-desktop-openpower.pdf

1. Desktop on an OpenPOWER
system? YES!
Dan Horák, Red Hat / Fedora

2. 2 / 20
Desktop on an OpenPOWER system?
YES!
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Introduction
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Why?
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Hardware
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OS and Software
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Challenges

3. 3 / 20
Introduction
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/me works in the Multi-Arch team in Red Hat
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our goal is parity between all arches in the OS and beyond
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my part is to make sure Fedora works well on Power and
mainframes

4. 4 / 20
Why?
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why not ;-)
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dog-fooding aka test what we produce
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working locally vs. remotely
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it’s high-performance and open
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heterogeneity helps quality

5. 5 / 20
Hardware
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https://openpowerfoundation.org/ opened the chance for an
ecosystem to grow
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IBM, Tyan, Supermicro, Raptor CS, …
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server vs. desktop = fan management
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Talos II is 1st Power/PowerPC workstation after 10 years (YDL
PowerStation)

6. 6 / 20
Raptor Talos II
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further development of an OpenPOWER reference design (Romulus)
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https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
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dual 8-core + 4x16 GB RAM
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Radeon PRO WX4100 for video
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SoundBlaster PCIe for audio
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2x SATA HDD on on-board PMC/Adaptec SAS
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DVD on Marvell SATA PCIe card
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add-on USB3 ports PCIe card (NEC/Renesas)
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2x NVMe + SMC PCIe carrier card (with PEX8734 switch)

7. 7 / 20
Fedora
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collection of ~20k projects, all arches built from a single source in a
single step
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Fedora → RHEL → CentOS
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only ppc64le since F-29, used to have ppc64 and ppc too
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Everything, Server, Cloud & Container images
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Silverblue and Workstation Live in Rawhide
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desktops installable from Everything
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installation possible from USB in F-30 without workarounds
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“no bootloader” for PowerNV in F-31 installer

8. 8 / 20
Fedora – add-on repos
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RPMFusion.org
– for multimedia and other
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https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/sharkcz/talos-kernel/
– for latest rc kernels + patches from linuxppc-dev list
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https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/sharkcz/talos/
– for apps and backports
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https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/g/virtmaint-sig/virt-preview/
– for latest/rawhide virt stack on stable Fedora

9. 9 / 20
Fedora – some numbers
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IP addresses checking in with MirrorManager
– 175547 arch=x86_64
– 6895 arch=i386
– 1075 arch=armhfp
– 759 arch=aarch64
– 168 arch=ppc64le
– 42 arch=s390x
– 30 arch=ppc64
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EPEL counts are ~10x bigger

10. 10 / 20
Challenges - hardware
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new keyboard ;-)
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updating FPGA for early adopters or non-compliant power
supplies
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damage on the bottom of the mainboard
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not all consumer PCIe cards work – visit HCL on Talos wiki
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Talos firmware not merged into upstream

11. 11 / 20
Challenges - software
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convince upstreams there is new and powerful HW, but still there are
hostile upstreams
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64KB vs 4KB kernel page size
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different firmware versions between skiroot and host
– do PCIe reset for card re-initialization?
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DMA for 3D graphics
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browsers
– Firefox works out of the box, JIT for JavaScript in development
– Chromium ported, so QT WebEngine possible

12. 12 / 20
Challenges - software
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QEMU – powernv model (WIP, thanks, Cedric :-))
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multimedia codecs optimizations
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conflicting types for SIMD/Altivec – c++ vs gnu++
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faster boot
– https://opensource.com/article/19/1/booting-linux-faster
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“CI as a service” is missing
– running a multi-arch CI internally, but it doesn’t scale

13. 13 / 20
Challenges - software
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Firefox – ABI bug in the interface between JS and native code
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wrong callback signatures in GTK+ based apps
– gnome-keyring
– gthumb
– LibreOffice
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exhausted static TLS space – app fails to load all libs
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librsvg2 segfaults with “bad” Rust/LLVM
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who wins for Microwatt synthesis – ghdl/yosys or Xilinx? :-)

14. 14 / 20
Conclusion
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Yes, it works! it’s my primary workstation for 1+ year
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demo depends on an OpenPOWER laptop :-)

15. 15 / 20
Links
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https://openpowerfoundation.org/
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https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/PowerPC
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https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
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https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Main_Page

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