Fedora 41 mini-review on the Blackbird and Talos II

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 first mainstream distributions to support POWER9 out of the box, it's still one of the top distributions OpenPOWER denizens use and its position closest to the bleeding, ragged edge is where we see problems emerge first and get fixed (hopefully) before they move further downstream. That's why it's worth caring about it even if you yourself don't run it. Also, as always, recall both my Talos II and Blackbird are configured to come up in a text boot instead of gdm and I start the GUI manually from there. I always recommend a non-graphical boot as a recovery mechanism in case your graphics card gets whacked by something or other, and on Fedora this is easily done by ensuring the symlink /etc/systemd/system/default.target points to /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target.

I'll also give a quick shout out here to Dan Horák at Red Hat, who responds to our user issues and maintains some additional Fedora packages in copr. Read his newly updated blog for information.

Irritatingly, dnf continues to fail to update grub2's config (bug 1921479, showing messages like 0ed84c0-p94177c1: integer expression expected during the process), so the process remains largely unchanged from F39 and F40:

dnf upgrade --refresh # upgrade prior system and DNF
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg # force grub to update
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade # install upgrade plugin if not already done
dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=41 # download F41 packages
dnf system-upgrade reboot # reboot into upgrader

Again there was no installation screen on either the Blackbird or T2 this time around; for both systems I needed to log in as root on an alternate VTY (Ctrl-Alt-F2 or as appropriate) and either dnf system-upgrade log --number=-1 intermittently to watch the updates, or just do journalctl -f if you want a live feed and don't mind the scrollspam. You can probably also still monitor it on the virtual TTY in the BMC web interface. Both systems then rebooted (fast reboot is disabled on both) and came up clean, again with no XFS burp on the T2! I think we can conclude the updated Petitboot firmware has resolved that issue. As usual, one more grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg was needed to get Petitboot's menu looking right and the install was complete.

I should also note that two people on the Raptor forums reported that their systems were unbootable after this update. However, both the Blackbird and the T2 upgraded with no hitches except for a really old F33 package on the T2 I had to blow away, so I can't replicate that here and neither can Dan.

Let's proceed with testing out the Blackbird, which is my proving ground system before upgrading my regular T2 workstation. The biggest update is that in the most recent kernel versions, especially if you haven't done any updates between the F40 upgrade and now, we finally have 1920x1200 support on the built-in BMC HDMI video!

Yes, much as it pains me to say it, Wayland has finally progressed to the point where it's useable with the ASPEED BMC framebuffer. This is a crucial point to make if you're running a GPU-less configuration, especially if you're trying to achieve a fully libre machine with no firmware blobs: you can now use Wayland with it with little obvious compromise, if you really really want.

All resolutions up to 1920x1200 are supported, including 1920x1080. This works in both GNOME and KDE Plasma 6.2, though I'll have something bad to say about GNOME in a moment.

Now, there's still reasons not to use Wayland with BMC graphics, and the big one is that the fans just ran continuously in Wayland because everything is getting crammed through llvmpipe. This is a little 4-core Blackbird and it could keep up with it, but it certainly earned its money doing so. When I switched back to Xorg using plasma6-x11-unsupported, all was quiet again.

X11 modelines never had any problems supporting BMC video, but here it is for the record.

I also commented on the Chromium build now available for ppc64le in the F40 mini-review, so it's only fair to see how far it's come. And, well, it's come a long way. Many more things work and the previous graphical glitches in Xorg seem gone now. It's still somewhat rickety and crash reports pop up intermittently as its subprocesses fart and die, and really big Wasm apps like (oh the irony) Google Earth will bring it to its knees, but casual browsing largely works fine and it can run MAME from the Internet Archive's online arcade now with reasonable performance. I still find my personal builds of Firefox with Baseline JIT to be faster with browsing and I retain my philosophical objections to Chrome and Chromium, but I can't deny the progress, so this will make others of you happy.

Something that won't make you happy was GNOME. Whether it was Wayland or Xorg, there were tons of graphical artifacts on the blob-free Blackbird (these are photographs of the screen since the framebuffer didn't always reflect the issue):

The Plasma 6.2 update doesn't seem to break anything major, so if you're blob-free, I'd just use KDE with the unsupported X11 support. It's easier on the cores and it generally works. Xfce would probably be okay too.

On the T2, other than that weir-dass F33 remainder package, the upgrade was similarly smooth. Nothing so far has seemed to regress. However, the Talos II has a Raptor-BTO AMD WX7100 card, unlike the Blackbird.

Regular readers know very well I'll complain when it's time to complain, but this time around the F41 upgrade worked well and the system seems solid. I'm sorry to hear about the problems some others have had, but I couldn't replicate them here. So far this has been one of the smoother updates, which was a profound relief.