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Firefox 124 on POWER
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Firefox 123 on POWER
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Early Power11 signals in the kernel
That said, the reputed pressures around Power10 that caused closed IP to be incorporated are hopefully no longer as acute for Power11, and off-the-books discussions I've had suggest IBM internally acknowledges its strategic mistake. That would be good news for Power11, but it's not exactly clear what this means for Solid Silicon and the S1 because S1's entire value proposition is being Power10 without the crap. While S1 will certainly come out before Power11, we still don't know when, and if there's a short window between S1 and a fully open Power11 then S1 could go like Osborne.
"Short" here will be defined in terms of how much work it takes to adapt the Power11 reference system. IBM understandably always likes to sell its launch systems first and exclusively before the chips and designs trickle down. The Talos II and to a lesser extent the Blackbird are a relatively straightforward rework of Romulus (POWER9's reference), so one would think adapting Power11 would similarly require little adjustment, though Romulus used the ASPEED BMC and any Raptor Power11 would undoubtedly use (Ant)arctic Tern/Solid Silicon's X1. In contrast, there'd be a bit more work to port Rainier (Power10) to S1 since the RAM would be direct-attach instead of OMI and there may be differences to account for with PCIe, plus the BMC change. The last estimate we had for the S1 machines was late 2024; putting this all together and assuming that date is at all accurate, such a system may have a year or two on the market before Power11 exits its IBM-exclusive phase.
That could still be worth it, but all of this could be better answered if we had a little more insight into S1 and its progress, and I've still got my feelers out to talk to the Solid Silicon folks. You'll see it here first when I get a bite.
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Firmware 2.10 available for Talos II and Blackbird
An intriguing change for the future also in this release is to enable firmware component signature checks during IPL by default. But using what key, you ask? You didn't sign anything! The key is the insecure known key in the official firmware builds, which adds no security currently and doesn't look any different from before, but provides the framework for you signing it later. At that point you'd sign it with your own key and provide that; now everything is already set up, and the process should "just work" with fewer steps. This is a long-running entry I keep intending to write and this is a good excuse to do that in the near future.
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ICYMI: Hugo Landau explains how the Broadcom BCM5719 was freed
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Firefox 122 on POWER
A number of changes have occurred between Fx121 and Fx122 which improve our situation in OpenPOWER world, most notably being we no longer need to drag our WebRTC build changes around (and/or you can remove --disable-webrtc in your .mozconfig). However, on Fedora I needed to add ac_add_options --with-libclang-path=/usr/lib64 to my .mozconfigs (or ./mach build would fail during configuration because Rust bindgen could not find libclang.so), and I also needed to effectively fix bug 1865993 to get PGO builds to work again on Python 3.12, which Fedora 39 ships with. You may not need to do either of these things depending on your distro. There are separate weird glitches due to certain other components being deprecated in Python 3.12 that do not otherwise affect the build.
To that end, here is the updated PGO-LTO patch I'm using, as well as the current .mozconfigs:
Optimized
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc export CXX=/usr/bin/g++ mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j24" # or as you like ac_add_options --enable-application=browser ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O3 -mcpu=power9 -fpermissive" ac_add_options --enable-release ac_add_options --enable-linker=bfd ac_add_options --enable-lto=full ac_add_options --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries ac_add_options --with-libclang-path=/usr/lib64 ac_add_options MOZ_PGO=1 export GN=/home/censored/bin/gn # if you haz export RUSTC_OPT_LEVEL=2
Debug
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc export CXX=/usr/bin/g++ mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j24" # or as you like ac_add_options --enable-application=browser ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-Og -mcpu=power9 -fpermissive -DXXH_NO_INLINE_HINTS=1" ac_add_options --enable-debug ac_add_options --enable-linker=bfd ac_add_options --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries ac_add_options --with-libclang-path=/usr/lib64 export GN=/home/censored/bin/gn # if you haz
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