Support from a silicon turnip

Raptor is asking users to do a brief checklist before asking for support to help streamline problem determination. I think this just makes good sense, but although it's reasonable to assume most users would have another system around that can talk to the BMC (I use my Quad G5 for this), it might be nice in a future firmware version to have some sort of confidence testing. I'm not sure how that would look necessarily in implementation but I know when I was trying to determine why my kernel was freaking out that eliminating hardware as a cause, however unlikely, would have been helpful.

Ordinarily this would merit merely a brief informational item, except let's consider it in the context of my earlier underdeveloped pontification: Raptor must now have enough of an installed base that streamlining support is now necessary. I'm an early adopter; my Talos II is serial #12 and my Blackbird is serial #75. Back in those distant bygone days of 2018 with the early firmware that ran like a wind tunnel, I pretty much conversed with support directly over E-mail (I suspect it was Tim himself) and handled everything that way, but that clearly wouldn't scale beyond a certain number of even technically adept users. (I did comment at the time that it was the best support I'd ever had with any computer system and I still think so.)

We don't know how many Talos-family systems are out there, and Raptor is not a public company, so sales figures are kept close to the vest. I don't really begrudge them this, either, because pro-Power bigots like me would still use the platform even if we were the only ones out there and haters gonna hate whether there's 10 or 10 million. (However, if people want to post serial numbers in the comments, we can find the highest one and make an educated guess.) I think we can safely assume the support volume is not being driven by poor quality, so if support volume has increased to a critical mass where changes must be made, then that must be due to enough machines out there actually being used. And as I said in the prior article, moving enough machines is the only sane way to get the cost down. I stand by my musings that a good second workstation-market supplier could have advantages for both volume and market stability, but we also don't want some knockoff company that isn't beholden to open libre computing principles sucking the life from this segment with a race to the bottom.

Having said that: I hear things and people tell me stuff, and while I'm sworn to secrecy right now, I am permitted to say obliquely that a promising development in moving more machines is afoot. I think that's as much as I should say on the subject but if it pans out, I think all of us in the OpenPOWER world will be very, very pleased.