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    stephank avatar stephank 5 months ago | link | on: Power 9 May Dent x86 Servers

    So Power is switching to little endian by default?

    Only slightly related, but I’ve been looking for somewhere to test a piece of code on big endian, but that seems to be rather difficult as a private person. I think the only options are to find some physical hardware on the cheap?

    I have a Pi3, and that’s supposed to be bi-endian, but I’m not sure how to go about installing a big endian Linux on it. Same goes for a Scaleway ARM virtual machine, I guess.

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      vasi avatar vasi 5 months ago | link

      Shell accounts at Polarhome are free for developers of open source projects (and cheap otherwise). Their Debian/PPC and Solaris/SPARC are big-endian IIRC.

      You can also run QEMU, here’s a random repo with instructions.

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        peter avatar peter 5 months ago | link

        You should be able to virtualize, Debian for example supports some Big Endian architectures. I don’t reckon it matters much though, Big Endian is definitely on the way out.

        If you do want to go physical, you can get an Octeon-based system, they’re Big Endian mips64. Mostly used in networking equipment. Cavium has an incomplete list of products using Octeon processors, stuff under the consumer tab is probably your best bet for cheap stuff.

        I have a Ubiquiti UniFi Security Gateway running on Octeon. It’s running some kind of Debian derivative, or so I assume since dpkg and the Debian package keys are present.

        $ lscpu
Architecture:          mips64
Byte Order:            Big Endian
[...]

$ uname -a
Linux ubnt 3.10.20-UBNT #1 SMP Fri Nov 3 15:45:37 MDT 2017 mips64 GNU/Linux

        This seems consistent with the development kit information on the Cavium Octeon web page:

        OS: Linux 2.6 (SDK 2.x) for OCTEON II or Linux 3.10 (SDK 3.1.x) 64-bit SMP OS for OCTEON II & III

        My other UniFi hardware runs Little Endian ARMv7 though. Looks like processors made by either MediaTek, or Qualcomm for the wireless gizmos.

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          myfreeweb avatar myfreeweb 4 months ago | link

          Yeah, Ubiquiti’s Octeon stuff (specifically EdgeRouter) is quite well known, it’s supported by FreeBSD and OpenBSD for example. But consumer router grade CPUs are uhhhh rather weak :(

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          pkubaj avatar pkubaj 5 months ago | link

          Or just get actual POWER box. Talos II (mentioned in the article) is relatively cheap for the specs.

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            calvin avatar calvin edited 5 months ago | link

            It’s still very prohibitively expensive unless you’re very dedicated to having a POWER box. I have access to off-lease POWER6 boxes acquired for cheap on eBay, but those are large, loud, pour out heat, suck up electricity, and generally only desirable if you really want a POWER box but lack funds. (Not to mention the firmware bugs that IBM refused to patch for it, so newer distros don’t support POWER6.)

            Really, the best way to play with PPC still is to buy an old Power Mac, which is kinda sad.

            edit: interesting thread on this topic of high-end RISC systems being hard to acquire for devs, which reduces their viability on the market

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              pkubaj avatar pkubaj 5 months ago | link

              I guess I am dedicated :D

              But I’m going to get it because it’s all FOSS, no blobs, that’s the main reason. It’s also not that expensive, considering specs. And it’s just as power hungry as similar Intel boxes. Sure, older POWER generations were much more power hungry, but things changed with POWER9.

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            sevan avatar sevan 5 months ago | link

            the IBM PDP program gives access to POWER based systems, they’ve just added 9 support but previously had 7 & 8 based systems running AIX & Suse.

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            vasi avatar vasi 3 years ago | link | on: Brad Fitzpatrick on the future of the Go programming language (1.4, 1.5, & 2.0)

            I’m hoping they someday make more progress towards building shared libraries in Go. I’d be particularly interested if they were compatible with the C calling convention, though there are obvious difficulties implementing that!

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              vasi avatar vasi 4 years ago | link | on: What are you working on this week?

              I’m porting my implementation of squashfs to as many operating systems as possible: https://github.com/vasi/squashfuse/tree/branch_0.2 . My goal is to make it squashfuse the most portable FUSE filesystem around, that other people can use as an example when trying to port their own filesystems.