On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 04:26:23PM -0500, Taiidan@??? wrote:
> This is a much less expensive mATX variant of the TALOS 2 from the same
> people.
>
> It runs both little and big endian so both ppc64 and ppc64le and
> supports POWER-KVM/POWER-IOMMU/IOMMU-GFX for DMA protection and to
> attach PCI-e devices to VM's including PCI-e graphics devices[3]
>
> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blackbird-POWER9-Pre-Orders
> https://raptorcs.com/content/BK1B01/intro.html
> https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird
>
> The only binary blob is the onboard NIC firmware[1], otherwise it is
> fully open source, has a variety of end-user available documentation[4]
> and has no hardware code signing enforcement so it is entirely yours to
> own unlike modern x86 stuff which can't ever be free[2] and has the
> impossible to disable ME/PSP doing god knows what.
>
> OpenPOWER9 CPU's are Made in USA and the board is Made in the USA from
> US and (probably) foreign components so it is much more trustworthy.
>
> In terms of speed POWER9 is superior to the offerings from intel/amd or
> equivilant when compared without x86's spectre/meltdown protections
> enabled as intel most of the time disables them with their public CPU
> benchmarks.
>
> [1]The Broadcom NIC was the best alternative to using an intel nic as
> there is a large amount of documentation available, people are working
> on freeing it and the first one to do so gets a free TALOS 2 workstation
> worth 5K. Intel is considered a competitor so buying their networking
> ASIC's supports them and thus further anti-feature development - there
> is also the possibility of undocumented dangerous ME style features in
> the silicon mask rom.
>
> [2]New x86 hardware has none of the documentation published that is
> required to write firmware and it has a variety of black boxes like
> ME/PSP, boot guard etc designed to prevent you from owning and
> controlling your hardware.
>
> [3]They recommend the using the Radeon Pro WX31xx/41xx/51xx/71xx
> graphics cards series as they work the best with POWER - nvidia hates
> linux and tries time and again to break IOMMU-GFX on geforce cards
> requiring work arounds.
>
> [4]IBM provides to the public all the documents one would need to make
> their own POWER firmware and do various other things - more
> documentation is available for OpenPOWER members or by request.
>
> It really blows my mind that IBM of all companies is the one to save
> computing freedom - POWER is now the only owner controlled high
> performance CPU arch.

Reminds me of the old days when you could reprogram an IBM 360 to do
just about anything you wanted, and IBM would give you the information
you needed.

People developig the MTS time-sharing system (the one that actually
worked efficiently on the 360/67) even got IBM to implement custom
instructions for OS efficiency.

-- hendrik