I decided to cease posting here and move to jirka.1-2-8.net. Why? Because I publish more via the Gopher protocol than the HTTP/HTTPS one. And converting from Gopher to http must be done externally.
I might still publish something here (from time to time). But my post frequency is so low that it will probably make no difference…
My new 3U CPU heatsink arrived today. This is the big one with a fan. I ordered it the early August, the Raptor needed its usual two week to process the order (well, they still are a tiny company so they are not as fast as big ones), the USPS was fast this time but our Post Service was even slower than usually.
Anyway, the thing arrived. So I removed the older 2U heatsink and installed this new one. Of course I didn’t re-seated the PCU so the system refused to start. So I re-seated all things once more (including the RAM as it is placed close to the CPU socket) and it started to work!
Well, temperatures. My previous situation was 61-63oC in idle or light use (with CPU governor “powersave”) and up to 85-87oC in full use (with “ondemand”).
Now I have 51-52oC in normal use (with teh “ondemand” governor). By “normal use” I mean also running of a current, un-optimised Firefox with Javascript-burden WWW pages. I saw temperatures over 70oC in full use.
For your information, current temperatures (when I’m writing this post) are (as obtained from “sensors” command):
Chip 0 Core 0: +52.0°C (lowest = +25.0°C, highest = +67.0°C)
Chip 0 Core 4: +52.0°C (lowest = +26.0°C, highest = +68.0°C)
Chip 0 Core 8: +51.0°C (lowest = +25.0°C, highest = +66.0°C)
Chip 0 Core 12: +51.0°C (lowest = +27.0°C, highest = +69.0°C)
Chip 0 DIMM 12 : +52.0°C (lowest = +29.0°C, highest = +54.0°C)
Chip 0 Nest: +51.0°C (lowest = +27.0°C, highest = +60.0°C)
Chip 0 VRM VDD: +55.0°C (lowest = +31.0°C, highest = +61.0°C)
Please don’t ask me why the only RAM module is called "DIMM 12". I don’t know.
But the noise is different. The new CPU fan is very powerfull and noisy – it runs at full speed during start and increase of noise is noticeable (it’s much louder) than it was just with three case fans. But after that the system is quiet. Fans are running on slow speeds and they are even not noticeable. At least I cannot hear them. Previously the fans ran on pretty high speed so the system was near as noisy as my SGI O2 is (an its 10-years old and dirty fan is not really not quiet!). Now it is the quietest system in house. Even our GPD Pocket laptops are much more noisy (not speakting about the ORDOID or about the iMac G5).
So this piece of cra.., err, aluminium with the attached fan might be expensive but it worth its price!
Resume: If you are going to buy the Raptor Blackbird then you should buy the 3U heatsink and not the cheaper 2U one!
I have been started the transition from my SGI O2 (with the IRIX 6.5) to my brand new BlackBird (with the Fedora Linux, now in version 30). As I expected it is not (and will) not be smooth nor easy. At the moment I use the O2 for most of time and the BlackBird only when I need more computing power (and yes, also when I need to add a WordPress post). I ahve been trying to find good substitutes for various pieces of software which I have been using for years. Below is a short summary of things which are already done.
It is good to remember that the BlackBird is a POWER9 computer (ppc64le) not an Intel/AMD-based PC (i386 or x68_64) nor my favorite MIPS (misp/mipsel). It has its (big) advantages but it also can make it less compatible with some codes.
More on this topic later…
BTW, an archive of this blog can be also found at jirka@1-2-8.net/blog. That archive is much more friendly to old computers and browsers. Also a WWW version of my Gopher Phlog can be found at that place. Many thanks to Logout for them!
Temperature outside is not normal for Central Europe summer(31 degrees of Celsius) but I meat temperature on the BlackBird chips. The system is meant to be small (miniATX) and the default heat sink is passive, without the fan. My computer case is the Fractal Design CORE 1100 with one 120mm fan. I added a second 120mm one (it can be mounted on the side of the case – it’s located over Blackbird’s PCIe slots not over the CPU) and the results were not satisfying as usual CPU temperature was over 80 degrees of Celsius. It seems to be normal but I am not sure if it isn’t too much. And I am not sure what maz happen if the system will be under continuous load.
The case manual suggests that I can add a 80mm or 92mm fan to the back of the case. The 120mm one does not fit here. But the manual also says that I have to use or two 120mm fans (in the front and on the side) or two 92mm ones (onth the front and at the back of the case) and do not mix them. At the moment I the default 120mm one (front fan) and the new 92mm (at teh back) ad waiting for the second 92mm one.
The temperatures are about 75 degrees in idle and over 85~87 degrees under load (I use Fedora 30 with the MATE and CPU governor is “ondemand”). Most time I use a WWW browser, the Vim, some office tools and so. I’m running the LaTeX or the GCC randomly but not so often. So (except the Firefox) the system is not so much loaded (just now).
So I tried to play with the system a bit (help for tah is here). I changed the governor to “powersave”
# cpupower frequency-set -g powersave
And do I need all 16 threads? No, 4 should be enough for now. So I allowed just one thread per CPU core:
# ppc64_cpu --smt=off
Well, and do I really need all FOUR cores? Two should be enough:
# ppc64_cpu --cores-on=2
And now the temperature is 70~73 degrees for all time. And the system is still fast enough. And when I will have to to something bigger the I will set the “ondemand” or “performance” governor and make all 16 threads available.
But I’m going to test the new fans setup first…
So the Blackbird is installed and configured (at least partially). Thus I have re-organised my desk – I put my ODROID desktop to the storage and displaced the SGI O2.
The O2 is still my main computer but I wish to use the Blackbird for computationally intensive tasks. I also have to ad some hardware – there is no internal speaker so I must find suitable external ones. Also the Radeon WX4100 is still not installed. It is not necessary for browsing the web or for computations but 3D card will be essential for data visualizations.
In the future it may replace my O2 completely but at the moment I don’t think that it is possible. I first have to find some equivalent to tools that I have been using on my O2 (even for open source ones because some of them don’t compile on modern Linux systems).
I have been using the Fedora Linux. As a long-time Ubuntu/Debian user I am bit surprised by many things. I don’t say that it does not work (because it does very well – the “dnf” tool is easy to use for example) but I miss some software packages. So I have had to compile myself these things:
All of them even in the ubuntu. With some others I have had no luck, for example with the “x2x” which is essential for me. I also have to try the SPRNG library. And things like the csLaTeX work with issues (well, it says that it’s obsolete and it should not be used for new documents, but it also fails on my old documents).
So I still have to do a lot of things here…
Update: The x2x actually compiles without issues. The necessary dependencies are listed in the README.md file here. And SPRNG5 compiles well, too. But I will have to update my code to this version (I have been using the version 2).
Yesterday I finally installed a RAM stick that seems to be working (a 16GB Hynix of the type listed at the Raptor Wiki). It seems that it works in the A slot instead of the B which is recommended in the manual. For my great surprise the system finally started up to Petitboot. So I connected a USB stick with the Fedora 30 and tried to boot. It worked but installed just a base server system where the only configured package repository was that USB stick. I have not used RedHat/Fedora from the RedHat Linux 6.2 so I was a bit helpless here. Thus I tried to boot a Void Linux CD. It booted and it seems to be OK (well, I should read the manual first as it claims to be very different from mainstream Linux distros).
At the moment I decided to use the Fedora (which seems to be well supported here until I will sure that the whole computer works well. So I reinstalled the Fedora once more and this time with online package repository configured. I have not selected the Fedora Workstation but a system with simple window managers and I also have added some desktop environments (the MATE and the GNOME).
The installation required some time and then it ended in a working system with X11. The MATE is fast and the GNOME is fast, too (on the X11 – I still have not installed the discrete graphics so I don't want to try the Wayland).
There are no screenshots so far, sorry. I still dind’t modified the xorg.conf so my screen is still just 1024×768 so it does not look promising.
As everyone know, the XTerm is a terminal emulator. It emulates (among others) the ancient DEC VT102 text-only terminal. But that’s not all. It can also do some graphics because it can also emulate the Tektronix 4014 terminal. And these Tektronix ones were actualy able not only to do text but also some points and lines! The main limitation is that Tektronix emulation is “black and white” only (it recognises just two XTerm colors: the foreground one and the background one).
This emulation is a bit limited but it’s fully functional. To enable the Tektronix emulation mode it is only needed to use the -t command line parameter:
xterm -t
Then is is useful to set the TERM variable to something like “tek”,
“4014” or “tek4014” (the “tek” one worked for me very well):
export TERM=tek
By the way, this stuff also worked for remote connection. So you can set the Tektronix mode for your local XTerm and generate graphics at the opposite end of your connection. For example you can run the Gnuplot on the SDF and see the graphs on your local XTerm.
The Gnuplot can produce results in Tektronix-compatible format. Just
set the proper terminal:
export TERM=xterm
There are also other Gnuplot terminals (“vttek”, “tek40xx” and so) but the “xterm” one is the best suited for the XTerm – it actually opens two XTerm windows. The first is the Tektronix emulation one for graphics and the second is a VT102-compatible one for the Gnuplot command interface. So you can work in the same way as if you are using the default X11 output window. The main difference is that thus way is more resources-friendly and work wonderfully also for slow remote connections (and there is no need for the remote server to have anything realted to the X11/Xorg. The SSH/telnet connection is just enough).
There are other programs which can save in Tektronix-compatible format. Their output can be plotted with help of the “plot” program from the GNU Plotutils (the old UNIX “plot” or “tplot” program should work, too):
cat yourfile.out | plot -Ttek
The Plotutils also include modern versions of other classical UNIX tools. There is a “graph” program, for example. But you can find more in this great
old tutorial from the Oregon State University. The whole “Coping with Unix, a Survival Guide” tutorial is great reading, by the way.
I have to thank to the Mastodon user niconiconi who tooted about this long-forgotten ability of the XTerm. I was aware of that but never tried it before.
This is just a test how the contemporary WordPress behaves in the TenFourFox on a G4 PowerBook (it’s the fastest model of the PB, that 1.67GHz with DDR2 memory, and with the OS 10.5).
Well, it starts with a big warning about old and unsecured FireFox browser. Then it worked rather normally (except the notice that I should switch to a new block editor – which I don’t want to do for obvious reasons). This “old” interface even does not requre the CPU to run at full speed for the most of time but only when one uses functions like the “Save Draft” or the “Preview”. Well, it’s a bit better than I have hoped and it behaves definitely better than on it behaves on my ODROID/Ubuntu desktop (which is a 32-bit 8-core ARM computer). But it probably does not mean that 14 years old PowerPC laptop is better than a semi-modern ARM one. It means that Cameron has been doing excellent work in making the TenFourFox and in optimizing it for these old PowerPC machines..
Sooo, I have had the parts so the only remaining thing is put them together. It has been sounding easy, right?
Well, there have been some problems:
Update: I got a new memory stick. A second-hand Hynix which should be 100% compatible. It may be but this particular stick seems to be dead (the system does not recognise it at all).
Jirka's notes 