Periodically in life I’ve had the desire to be somewhat fit, or at least have the benefits that come with that such as not dying early and being able to navigate a mountain (or just the city of Seattle) on foot without collapsing. I have also found that holding myself accountable via data is pretty vital to me actually going and repeatedly doing something.
So, at some point I got myself a Garmin watch. The year was 2012 and it was a Garmin Forerunner 410. It had a standard black/grey LCD screen, GPS (where getting a GPS lock could be utterly infuriatingly slow), a sensor you attached to your foot, a sensor you strap to your chest for Heart Rate monitoring, and an ANT+ dongle for connecting to a PC to download your activities. There was even some open source software that someone wrote so I could actually get data off my watch on my Linux laptops. This wasn’t a smart watch – it was exclusively for wearing while exercising and tracking an activity, otherwise it was just a watch.
However, as I was ramping up to marathon distance running, one huge flaw emerged: I was not fast enough to run a marathon in the time that the battery in my Garmin lasted. IIRC it would end up dying around 3hr30min into something, which at the time was increasingly something I’d describe as “not going for too long of a run”. So, the search for a replacement began!
The year was 2017, and the Garmin fenix 5x attracted me for two big reasons: a battery life to be respected, and turn-by-turn navigation. At the time, I seldom went running with a phone, preferring a tiny SanDisk media play (RIP, they made a new version that completely sucked) and a watch. The attraction of being able to get better maps back to where I started (e.g. a hotel in some strange city where I didn’t speak the language) was very appealing. It also had (what I would now describe as) rudimentary smart-watch features. It didn’t have even remotely everything the Pebble had, but it was enough.
So, a (non-trivial) pile of money later (even with discounts), I had myself a shiny and virtually indestructible new Garmin. I didn’t even need a dongle to sync it anywhere – it could just upload via its own WiFi connection, or through Bluetooth to the Garmin Connect app to my phone. I could also (if I ever remembered to), plug in the USB cable to it and download the activities to my computer.
One problem: my skin rebelled against the Garmin fenix 5x after a while. Like, properly rebelled. If it wasn’t coming off, I wanted to rip it off. I tried all of the tricks that are posted anywhere online. Didn’t help. I even got tested for what was the most likely culprit (a Nickel allergy), and didn’t have one of them, so I (still) have no idea what I’m actually allergic to in it. It’s just that I cannot wear it constantly. Urgh. I was enjoying the daily smart watch uses too!
So, that’s one rather expensive watch that is special purpose only, and even then started to get to be a bit of an issue around longer activities. Urgh.
So the hunt began for a smart watch that I could wear constantly. This usually ends in frustration as anything I wanted was hundreds of $ and pretty much nobody listed what materials were in it apart from “stainless steel”, “may contain”, and some disclaimer about “other materials”, which wasn’t a particularly useful starting point for “it is one of these things that my skin doesn’t like”. As at least if the next one also turned out to cause me problems, I could at least have a list of things that I could then narrow down to what I needed to avoid.
So that was all annoying, with the end result being that I went a long time without really wearing a watch. Why? The search resumed periodically and ended up either with nothing, or totally nothing. That was except if I wanted to get further into some vendor lock-in.
Honestly, the only manufacturer of anything smartwatch like which actually listed everything and had some options was Apple. Bizarre. Well, since I already got on the iPhone bandwagon, this was possible. Rather annoyingly, they are very tied together and thus it makes it a bit of a vendor-lock-in if you alternate phone and watch replacement and at any point wish to switch platforms.
That being said though, it does work well and not irritate my skin. So that’s a bonus! If I get back into marathon level distance running, we’ll see how well it goes. But for more common distances that I’ve run or cycled with it… the accuracy seems decent, HR monitor never just sometimes decides I’m not exerting myself, and the GPS actually gets a lock in reasonable time. Plus it can pair with headphones and be the only thing I take out with me.
Somewhere in the mid to late 1990s I picked myself up a Macintosh Plus for the sum of $60AUD. At that time there were still computer Swap Meets where old and interesting equipment was around, so I headed over to one at some point (at the St Kilda Town Hall if memory serves) and picked myself up four 1MB SIMMs to boost the RAM of it from the standard 1MB to the insane amount of 4MB. Why? Umm… because I could? The RAM was pretty cheap, and somewhere in the house to this day, I sometimes stumble over the 256KB SIMMs as I just can’t bring myself to get rid of them.
This upgrade probably would have cost close to $2,000 at the system’s release. If the Macintosh system software were better at disk caching you could have easily held the whole 800k of the floppy disk in memory and still run useful software!
One of the annoying things that started with the Macintosh was odd screws and Apple gear being hard to get into. Compare to say, the Apple ][ which had handy clips to jump inside whenever. In fitting my massive FOUR MEGABYTES of RAM back in the day, I recall using a couple of allen keys sticky-taped together to be able to reach in and get the recessed Torx screws. These days, I can just order a torx bit off Amazon and have it arrive pretty quickly. Well, two torx bits, one of which is just too short for the job.
My (dusty) Macintosh Plus
One thing had always struck me about it, it never really looked like the photos of the Macintosh Plus I saw in books. In what is an embarrassing number of years later, I learned that a lot can be gotten from the serial number printed on the underside of the front of the case.
Manufactured in: F => Fremont, California, USA Year of production: 1985 Week of production: 14 Production number: 3V3 => 4457 Model ID: M0001WP => Macintosh 512K (European Macintosh ED)
Your Macintosh 512K (European Macintosh ED) was the 4457th Mac manufactured during the 14th week of 1985 in Fremont, California, USA.
Pretty cool! So it is certainly a Plus as the logic board says that, but it’s actually an upgraded 512k! If you think it was madness to have a GUI with only 128k of RAM in the original Macintosh, you’d be right. I do not envy anybody who had one of those.
Some time a decent (but not too many, less than 10) years ago, I turn on the Mac Plus to see if it still worked. It did! But then… some magic smoke started to come out (which isn’t so good), but the computer kept working! There’s something utterly bizarre about looking at a computer with smoke coming out of it that continues to function perfectly fine.
Anyway, as the smoke was coming out, I decided that it would be an opportune time to turn it off, open doors and windows, and put it away until I was ready to deal with it.
One Global Pandemic Later, and now was the time.
I suspected it was going to be a capacitor somewhere that blew, and figured that I should replace it, and probably preemptively replace all the other electrolytic capacitors that could likely leak and cause problems.
First thing’s first though: dismantle it and clean everything. First, taking the case off. Apple is not new to the game of annoying screws to get into things. I ended up spending $12 on this set on Amazon, as the T10 bit can actually reach the screws holding the case on.
My Macintosh Plus with the case off. Note INTERNATIONAL and DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE
Cathode Ray Tubes are not to be messed with. We’re talking lethal voltages here. It had been many years since electricity went into this thing, so all was good. If this all doesn’t work first time when reassembling it, I’m not exactly looking forward to discharging a CRT and working on it.
The inside of my Macintosh Plus, with lots of grime.
You can see there’s grime everywhere. It’s not the worst in the world, but it’s not great (and kinda sticky). Obviously, this needs to be cleaned! The best way to do that is take a lot of photos, dismantle everything, and clean it a bit at a time.
There’s four main electronic components inside a Macintosh Plus:
The CRT itself
The floppy disk drive
The Logic Board (what Mac people call what PC people call the motherboard)
The Analog Board
There’s also some metal structure that keeps some things in place. There’s only a few connectors between things, which are pretty easy to remove. If you don’t know how to discharge a CRT and what the dangers of them are you should immediately go and find out through reading rather than finding out by dying. I would much prefer it if you dyed (because creative fun) rather than died.
Once the floppy connector and the power connector is unplugged, the logic board slides out pretty easily. You can see from the photo below that I have the 4MB of RAM installed and the resistor you need to snip is, well, snipped (but look really closely for that). Also, grime.
Macintosh Plus Logic Board
Cleaning things? Well, there’s two ways that I have used (and considering I haven’t yet written the post with “hurray, it all works”, currently take it with a grain of salt until I write that post). One: contact cleaner. Two: detergent.
Macintosh Plus Logic Board (being washed in my sink)
I took the route of cleaning things first, and then doing recapping adventures. So it was some contact cleaner on the boards, and then some soaking with detergent. This actually all worked pretty well.
Note that C30, C32, C38, C39, and C37 were missing from the kit I received (probably due to differences in the US and International boards). I did have an X2 cap (for C37) but it was 0.1uF not 0.47uF. I also had two extra 1000uF 16V caps.
Macintosh Repair and Upgrade Secrets (up to the Mac SE no less!) holds an Appendix with the parts listing for both the US and International Analog boards, and this led me to conclude that they are in fact different boards rather than just a few wires that are different. I am not sure what the “For 120V operation, W12 must be in place” and “for 240V operation, W12 must be removed” writing is about on the International Analog board, but I’m not quite up to messing with that at the moment.
So, I ordered the parts (linked above) and waited (again) to be able to finish re-capping the board.
I found https://youtu.be/H9dxJ7uNXOA video to be a good one for learning a bunch about the insides of compact Macs, I recommend it and several others on his YouTube channel. One interesting thing I learned is that the X2 cap (C37 on the International one) is before the power switch, so could blow just by having the system plugged in and not turned on! Okay, so I’m kind of assuming that it also applies to the International board, and mine exploded while it was plugged in and switched on, so YMMV.
Additionally, there’s an interesting list of commonly failing parts. Unfortunately, this is also for the US logic board, so the tables in Macintosh Repair and Upgrade Secrets are useful. I’m hoping that I don’t have to replace anything more there, but we’ll see.
But, after the Nth round of parts being delivered….
Note the lack of an exploded capacitor
Yep, that’s where the exploded cap was before. Cleanup up all pretty nicely actually. Annoyingly, I had to run it all through a step-up transformer as the board is all set for Australian 240V rather than US 120V. This isn’t going to be an everyday computer though, so it’s fine.
Macintosh Plus booting up (note how long the memory check of 4MB of RAM takes. I’m being very careful as the cover is off. High, and possibly lethal voltages exposed.
Woohoo! It works. While I haven’t found my supply of floppy disks that (at least used to) work, the floppy mechanism also seems to work okay.
Macintosh Plus with a seemingly working floppy drive mechanism. I haven’t found a boot floppy yet though.
Next up: waiting for my Floppy Emu to arrive as it’ll certainly let it boot. Also, it’s now time to rip the house apart to find a floppy disk that certainly should have made its way across the ocean with the move…. Oh, and also to clean up the mouse and keyboard.
I have done a few builds of firmware for the Raptor Blackbird since I got mine, each of them based on upstream op-build plus a few patches. The previous one was Yet another near-upstream Raptor Blackbird firmware build that I built a couple of months ago. This new build is based off the release candidate of op-build v2.5. Here’s what’s changed:
There’s two differences from upstream op-build: my pull request to op-build, and the fixing of the (old) buildroot so that it’ll build on Fedora 32. From discussions on the openpower-firmware mailing list, it seems that one hopeful thing is to have all the Blackbird support merged in before the final op-build v2.5 is tagged. The previous op-build release (v2.4) was tagged in July 2019, so we’re about 10 months into what was a 2 month release cycle, so speculating on when that final release will be is somewhat difficult.
The Self Boot Engine (SBE) is a small embedded PPE42 core inside the POWER9 CPU which has the unenvious job of getting a single POWER9 core ready enough to start executing instructions out of L3 cache, and poking some instructions into said cache for the core to start executing.
It’s called the “Self Boot Engine” as in generations prior to POWER8, it was the job of the FSP (Service Processor) to do all of the booting for the CPU. On POWER8, there was still an SBE, but it was a custom instruction set (this was the Power On Reset Engine – PORE), while the PPE42 is basically a 32bit powerpc core cut straight down the middle (just the way to make it awkward for toolchains).
One of the things I noted in my post on Booting temporary firmware on the Raptor Blackbird is that we got serial console output from the SBE. It turns out one of thing things explicitly not enabled by Raptor in their build was this output as “it made the SBE boot much slower”. I’d actually long suspected this, but hadn’t really had the time to delve into it.
WARNING: hacking on your SBE firmware can be relatively dangerous, as it’s literally the first thing that needs to work in order to boot the system, and there isn’t (AFAIK) publicly documented easy way to re-flash your SBE firmware if you mess it up.
Seeing as we saw a regression in boot time with the UART output enabled, we need to look at the uartPutChar() function in sbeConsole.C (error paths removed for clarity):
One thing you may notice if you’ve spent some time around serial ports is that it’s not using the transmit FIFO! While according to Wikipedia the original 16550 had a broken FIFO, but we’re certainly not going to be hooked up to an original rev of that silicon.
To compare, let’s look at the skiboot code, which is all in hw/lpc-uart.c:
The uart_check_tx_room() function is pretty simple, it checks if there’s room in the FIFO and knows that there’s 16 entries. Next, we have a busy loop that waits until there’s room again in the FIFO:
static void uart_wait_tx_room(void)
{
while (!tx_room) {
uart_check_tx_room();
if (!tx_room) {
smt_lowest();
do {
barrier();
uart_check_tx_room();
} while (!tx_room);
smt_medium();
}
}
}
Finally, the bit of code that writes the (internal) log buffer out to a serial port:
/*
* Internal console driver (output only)
*/
static size_t uart_con_write(const char *buf, size_t len)
{
size_t written = 0;
/* If LPC bus is bad, we just swallow data */
if (!lpc_ok() && !mmio_uart_base)
return written;
lock(&uart_lock);
while(written < len) {
if (tx_room == 0) {
uart_wait_tx_room();
if (tx_room == 0)
goto bail;
} else {
uart_write(REG_THR, buf[written++]);
tx_room--;
}
}
bail:
unlock(&uart_lock);
return written;
}
The skiboot code ends up being a bit more complicated thanks to a number of reasons, but the basic algorithm could be applied to the SBE code, and rather than busy waiting for each character to be written out before sending the other into the FIFO, we could just splat things down there and continue with life. So, I put together a patch to try out.
Before (i.e. upstream SBE code): it took about 15 seconds from “Welcome to SBE” to “Booting Hostboot”.
Now (with my patch): Around 10 seconds.
It’s a full five seconds (33%) faster to get through the SBE stage of booting. Wow.
Hopefully somebody looks at the pull request sometime soon, as it’s probably useful to a lot of people doing firmware and Operating System development.
So, Happy New Year for Blackbird owners (I’ll publish a build with this and other misc improvements “soon”).
It goes without saying that using this build is a At Your Own Risk and I make zero warranty. AFAIK it can’t physically destroy your system.
My GitHub op-build branch stewart-blackbird-v1 has all the changes built into this build (the VERSION displayed in firmware will be slightly weird as I did the tagging afterwards… this is not meant to be “howto release firmware to the public”). Follow op-build pull 3341 for the state of upstreaming everything.
Linux v5.4.3-openpower1 because 5.3.7 in the current op-build repo has an NVME driver bug that means it didn’t recognize my Intel NVME drive, and thus prevented me from actually booting an OS.
Apart from that, I was all happy as Larry. Except then I went into the room with the Blackbird in it an went “huh, that’s loud”, and since it was bedtime, I decided it could all wait until the morning.
It is now the morning. Checking fan speeds over IPMI, one fan stood out (fan2, sitting at 4300RPM). This was a bit of a surprise as what’s silkscreened on the board is that the rear case fan is hooked up to ‘fan2″, and if we had a “start from 0/1” mix up, it’d be the front case fan. I had just assumed it’d be maybe OCC firmware dying or something, but this wasn’t the case (I checked – thanks occtoolp9!)
After a bit of digging around, I worked out this mapping:
IPMI fan0
Rear Case Fan
Motherboard Fan 2
IPMI fan1
Front Case Fan
Motherboard Fan 3
IPMI fan2
CPU Fan
Motherboard Fan 1
Which is about as surprising and confusing as you’d think.
After a bunch of digging around the Raptor ports of OpenBMC and Hostboot, it seems that the IPL Observer which is custom to Raptor controls if the BMC decides to do fan control or not.
You can get its view of the world from the BMC via the (incredibly user friendly) poking at DBus:
Which if you just have the Hostboot patch in (like I first did) you end up with:
s "IPL_RUNNING"
s "21,3"
Which is where Hostboot exits the IPL process (as you see on the screen) and hands over to skiboot. But if you start digging through their op-build tree, you find that there’s a signal_linux_start_complete script which calls pnv-lpc to write two values to LPC ports 0x81 and 0x82. The pnv-lpc utility is the external/lpc/ binary from skiboot, and these two ports are the “extended lpc port 80h” state.
So, to get back fan control? First, build the lpc utility:
git clone git@github.com:open-power/skiboot.git
cd skiboot/external/lpc
make
and then poke the magic values of “IPL complete and linux running”:
$ sudo ./lpc io 0x81.b=254
[io] W 0x00000081.b=0xfe
$ sudo ./lpc io 0x82.b=254
[io] W 0x00000082.b=0xfe
You get a friendly beep, and then your fans return to sanity.
Of course, for that to work you need to have debugfs mounted, as this pokes OPAL debugfs to do direct LPC operations.
Next up: think of a smarter way to trigger that than “stewart runs it on the command line”. Also next up: work out the better way to determine that fan control should be on and patch the BMC.
In a future post, I’ll detail how to build my ported-to-upstream Blackbird firmware. Here though, we’ll explore booting some firmware temporarily to experiment.
Step 1: Copy your new PNOR image over to the BMC. Step 2: … Step 3: Profit!
Okay, not really, once you’ve copied over your image, ensure the computer is off and then you can tell the daemon that provides firmware to the host to use a file backend for it rather than the PNOR chip on the motherboard (i.e. yes, you can boot your system even when the firmware chip isn’t there – although I’ve not literally tried this).
One of the improvements is we now get output from the SBE! This means that when we do things like mess up secure boot and non secure boot firmware (I’ll explain why/how this is a thing later), we’ll actually get something useful out of a serial port:
And then we’re back into normal Hostboot boot (which we’ve all seen before) and end up at a newer petitboot!
Petitboot 1.11 on a Raptor Blackbird
One notable absence from that screenshot is my installed Fedora is missing. This is because there appears to be a bug in the 5.3.7 kernel that’s currently upstream, and if we drop to the shell and poke at lspci and dmesg, we can work out what could be the culprit:
Exiting petitboot. Type 'exit' to return.
You may run 'pb-sos' to gather diagnostic data
No password set, running as root. You may set a password in the System Configuration screen.
# lspci
0000:00:00.0 PCI bridge: IBM Device 04c1
0001:00:00.0 PCI bridge: IBM Device 04c1
0001:01:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Intel Corporation Device f1a8 (rev 03)
0002:00:00.0 PCI bridge: IBM Device 04c1
0002:01:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9235 PCIe 2.0 x2 4-port SATA 6 Gb/s Controller (rev 11)
0003:00:00.0 PCI bridge: IBM Device 04c1
0003:01:00.0 USB controller: Texas Instruments TUSB73x0 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 xHCI Host Controller (rev 02)
0004:00:00.0 PCI bridge: IBM Device 04c1
0004:01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
0004:01:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
0004:01:00.2 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
0005:00:00.0 PCI bridge: IBM Device 04c1
0005:01:00.0 PCI bridge: ASPEED Technology, Inc. AST1150 PCI-to-PCI Bridge (rev 04)
0005:02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ASPEED Technology, Inc. ASPEED Graphics Family (rev 41)
# dmesg|grep -i nvme
[ 2.991038] nvme nvme0: pci function 0001:01:00.0
[ 2.991088] nvme 0001:01:00.0: enabling device (0140 -> 0142)
[ 3.121799] nvme nvme0: Identify Controller failed (19)
[ 3.121802] nvme nvme0: Removing after probe failure status: -5
# uname -a
Linux skiroot 5.3.7-openpower1 #2 SMP Sat Dec 14 09:06:20 PST 2019 ppc64le GNU/Linux
If for some reason the device didn’t show up in lspci, then I’d look at the skiboot firmware log, which is /sys/firmware/opal/msglog.
Looking at upstream stable kernel patches, it seems like 5.3.8 has a interesting looking patch when you realize that ppc64le uses a 64k page size:
commit efac0f186ea654e8389f5017c7f643ef48cb4b93
Author: Kevin Hao <haokexin@gmail.com>
Date: Fri Oct 18 10:53:14 2019 +0800
nvme-pci: Set the prp2 correctly when using more than 4k page
commit a4f40484e7f1dff56bb9f286cc59ffa36e0259eb upstream.
In the current code, the nvme is using a fixed 4k PRP entry size,
but if the kernel use a page size which is more than 4k, we should
consider the situation that the bv_offset may be larger than the
dev->ctrl.page_size. Otherwise we may miss setting the prp2 and then
cause the command can't be executed correctly.
Fixes: dff824b2aadb ("nvme-pci: optimize mapping of small single segment requests")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Hao <haokexin@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Keith Busch <kbusch@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
So, time to go try 5.3.8. My yaks are getting quite smooth.
Oh, and when you’re done with your temporary firmware, either fiddle with mboxctl or restart the systemd service for it, or reboot your BMC or… well, I gotta leave you something to work out on your own :)
Now that I can actually boot the machine, I could test and send my patch upstream for Blackbird support in skiboot. One thing I noticed with the current firmware from Raptor is that the PCIe slot names were wrong. While a pretty minor point, it’s a bit funny that there’s only two slots and the names were wrong.
The PCIe slot names are used to call out the physical location of PCIe cards in the system, so if you, say, hit a bunch of errors, OS/firmware can say “It’s this card in the slot labeled BLAH on the board”.
With my patch, the slot table from skiboot is spat out looking like this:
If you want to give it a go, grab the patch, build skiboot, and flash it on. Alternatively, you can download a built skiboot here. To flash it, do this:
# Copy to your BMC for the Blackbird
scp skiboot-v6.5-146-g376bed3f.lid.xz.stb root@blackbird:/tmp/
# then, ssh to the BMC
$ ssh root@blackbird
# ensure the machine is off
obmcutil poweroff --wait
# Now, make a backup copy (remember to copy it off /tmp on the bmc)
pflash -P PAYLOAD -r /tmp/skiboot-backup
# and flash the new skiboot:
pflash -e -P PAYLOAD -p /tmp/skiboot.lid.xz.stb
# now, power on the box
obmcutil poweron
Well, after the half false start of not having RAM so really not being able to do much (yeah yeah, I hear you – I’m weak for not just running Linux in L3), my RAM arrived today. Putting the sticks in was easy (of course), although does not make for an exciting photo.
One DIMM in the Blackbird
After that, I SSH’d the the BMC and then did “obmcutil poweron” (as is traditional) and started looking at the console via conneting via SSH to port 2200 on the BMC. I was then greeted by the (by this time in my life rather familiar) Hostboot:
The first IPL updated the Self Boot Engine firmware on the chip, so it automatically applied the new firmware and rebooted to finish applying it. This is perfectly normal, it just shows itself as a longer boot time. Booting continues:
The rest of the skiboot log was also spat out, and then the familiar Petitboot screen:
Welcome to Petitboot!
It lives! I even had a bit of a look at the sensors to see power consumption and temperatures. All looks good:
ipmitool sdr|grep -v ns
occ0 | 0x00 | ok
occ1 | 0x00 | ok
p0_core3_temp | 51 degrees C | ok
p0_core5_temp | 49 degrees C | ok
p0_core7_temp | 50 degrees C | ok
p0_core11_temp | 49 degrees C | ok
p0_core15_temp | 50 degrees C | ok
p0_core17_temp | 50 degrees C | ok
p0_core19_temp | 50 degrees C | ok
p0_core21_temp | 50 degrees C | ok
dimm0_temp | 36 degrees C | ok
dimm4_temp | 39 degrees C | ok
fan0 | 1300 RPM | ok
fan1 | 1200 RPM | ok
fan2 | 1000 RPM | ok
p0_power | 60 Watts | ok
p0_vdd_power | 31 Watts | ok
p0_vdn_power | 10 Watts | ok
cpu_1_ambient | 30.90 degrees C | ok
pcie | 27 degrees C | ok
ambient | 25.40 degrees C | ok
Way back when Raptor Computer Systems was doing pre-orders for the microATX Blackboard POWER9 system, I put in a pre-order. Since then, I’ve had a few life changes (such as moving to the US and starting to work for Amazon rather than IBM), but I’ve finally gone and done (most of) the setup for my own POWER9 system on (or under) my desk.
An 8 core POWER9 CPU, in bubble wrap and plastic packaging.
Everything came in a big brown box, all rather well packed. I had the board, CPU, heatsink assembly and the special tool to attach the heatsink to the board. Although unique to POWER9, the heatsink/fan assembly was one of the easier ones I’ve ever attached to a board.
The board itself looks pretty much as you’d expect – there’s a big spot for the CPU, a couple of PCI slots, a couple of DIMM slots and some SATA connectors.
The bits that are a bit unusual for a micro-ATX board are the big space reserved for FlexVer, the ASPEED BMC chip and the socketed flash. FlexVer is something I’m not ever going to use, and instead wish that there was an on-board m2 SSD slot instead, even if it was just PCIe. Having to sacrifice a PCIe slot just for a SSD is kind of a bummer.
The Blackbird POWER9 board
The POWER9 chip in socket
If you’re in the know, you know the pain these two chips and their firmware cause you. Luckily, the ASPEED2500 is running OpenBMC, so there is hope, plus there’s a “write open source firmware for it” effort for the Broadcom.
One annoying thing is my DIMMs are taking their sweet time in getting here, so I couldn’t actually populate the board with any memory.
Even without memory though, you can start powering it on and see that everything else works okay (i.e. it’s not completely boned). So, even without DIMMs, I could plug it in, and observe the Hostboot firmware complaining about insufficient hardware to IPL the box.
It Lives!
Yep, out the console (via ssh) you clearly see where things fail:
--== Welcome to Hostboot hostboot-3beba24/hbicore.bin ==--
3.03104|secure|SecureROM valid - enabling functionality
6.67619|Booting from SBE side 0 on master proc=00050000
6.85100|ISTEP 6. 5 - host_init_fsi
7.23753|ISTEP 6. 6 - host_set_ipl_parms
7.71759|ISTEP 6. 7 - host_discover_targets
11.34738|HWAS|PRESENT> Proc[05]=8000000000000000
11.34739|HWAS|PRESENT> Core[07]=1511540000000000
11.69077|ISTEP 6. 8 - host_update_master_tpm
11.73787|SECURE|Security Access Bit> 0x0000000000000000
11.73787|SECURE|Secure Mode Disable (via Jumper)> 0x8000000000000000
11.76276|ISTEP 6. 9 - host_gard
11.96654|HWAS|FUNCTIONAL> Proc[05]=8000000000000000
11.96655|HWAS|FUNCTIONAL> Core[07]=1511540000000000
12.07554|================================================
12.07554|Error reported by hwas (0x0C00) PLID 0x90000007
12.10289| checkMinimumHardware found no functional dimm cards.
12.10290| ModuleId 0x03 MOD_CHECK_MIN_HW
12.10291| ReasonCode 0x0c06 RC_SYSAVAIL_NO_MEMORY_FUNC
12.10292| UserData1 HUID of node : 0x0002000000000000
12.10293| UserData2 number of present, non-functional dimms : 0x0000000000000000
12.10294|------------------------------------------------
12.10417| Callout type : Procedure Callout
12.10417| Procedure : EPUB_PRC_FIND_DECONFIGURED_PART
12.10418| Priority : SRCI_PRIORITY_HIGH
12.10419|------------------------------------------------
12.10420| Hostboot Build ID: hostboot-3beba24/hbicore.bin
12.10421|================================================
12.51718|================================================
12.51719|Error reported by hwas (0x0C00) PLID 0x90000007
12.51720| Insufficient hardware to continue.
12.51721| ModuleId 0x03 MOD_CHECK_MIN_HW
12.51722| ReasonCode 0x0c04 RC_SYSAVAIL_INSUFFICIENT_HW
12.54457| UserData1 : 0x0000000000000000
12.54458| UserData2 : 0x0000000000000000
12.54458|------------------------------------------------
12.54459| Callout type : Procedure Callout
12.54460| Procedure : EPUB_PRC_FIND_DECONFIGURED_PART
12.54461| Priority : SRCI_PRIORITY_HIGH
12.54462|------------------------------------------------
12.54462| Hostboot Build ID: hostboot-3beba24/hbicore.bin
12.54463|================================================
12.73660|System shutting down with error status 0x90000007
12.75545|================================================
12.75546|Error reported by istep (0x1700) PLID 0x90000007
12.77991| IStep failed, see other log(s) with the same PLID for reason.
12.77992| ModuleId 0x01 MOD_REPORTING_ERROR
12.77993| ReasonCode 0x1703 RC_FAILURE
12.77994| UserData1 eid of first error : 0x9000000800000c04
12.77995| UserData2 Reason code of first error : 0x0000000100000609
12.77996|------------------------------------------------
12.77996| host_gard
12.77997|------------------------------------------------
12.77998| Callout type : Procedure Callout
12.77998| Procedure : EPUB_PRC_HB_CODE
12.77999| Priority : SRCI_PRIORITY_LOW
12.78000|------------------------------------------------
12.78001| Hostboot Build ID: hostboot-3beba24/hbicore.bin
12.78002|================================================
Looking forward to getting some DIMMs to show/share more.
I have used Android phones since the first one: the G1. I’m one of the (relatively) few people who has used Android 1.0. I’ve had numerous Android phones since then, mostly the Google flagship.
I have fond memories of the Nexus One and Galaxy Nexus, as well as a bunch of time running Cyanogen (often daily builds, because YOLO) to get more privacy preserving features (or a more recent Android). I had a Sony Z1 Compact for a while which was great bang for buck except for the fact the screen broke whenever you looked at it sideways. Great kudos to the Sony team for being so friendly to custom firmware loads.
I buy my hardware from physical stores. Why? Well, it means that the NSA and others get to spend extra effort to insert hardware modifications (backdoors), as well as the benefit of having a place to go to/set the ACCC on to get my rights under Australian Consumer Law.
My phone before last was a Nexus 5X. There were a lot of good things about this phone; the promise of fast charging via USB-C was one, as was the ever improving performance of the hardware and Android itself. Well… it just got progressively slower, and slower, and slower – as if it was designed to get near unusable by the time of the next Google phone announcement.
Inevitably, my 5X succumbed to the manufacturing defect that resulted in a boot loop. It would start booting, and then spontaneously reboot, in a loop, forever. The remedy? Replace it under warranty! That would take weeks, which isn’t a suitable timeframe in this day and age to be without a phone, so I mulled over buying a Google Pixel or my first ever iPhone (my iPhone owning friends assured me that if such a thing happens with an iPhone that Apple would have swapped it on the spot). Not wanting to give up a lot of the personal freedom that comes with the Android world, I spent the $100 more to get the Pixel, acutely aware that having a phone was now a near $1000/year habit.
The Google Pixel was a fantastic phone (except the price, they should have matched the iPhone price). The camera was the first phone camera I actually went “wow, I’m impressed” over. The eye-watering $279 to replace a cracked screen, the still eye-watering cost of USB-C cables, and the seat to process the HDR photos were all forgiven. It was a good phone. Until, that is, less than a year in, the battery was completely shot. It would power off when less than 40% and couldn’t last the trip from Melbourne airport to Melbourne city.
So, with a flagship phone well within the “reasonable quality” time that consumer law would dictate, I contacted Google after going through all the standard troubleshooting. Google agreed this was not normal and that the phone was defective. I was told that they would mail me a replacement, I could transfer my stuff over and then mail in the broken one. FANTASTIC!! This was soooo much better than the experience with the 5X.
Except that it wasn’t. A week later, I rang back to ask what was going on as I hadn’t received the replacement; it turns out Google had lied to me, I’d have to mail the phone to them and then another ten business days later I’d have a replacement. Errr…. no, I’ve been here before.
I rang the retailer, JB Hi-Fi; they said it would take them at least three weeks, which I told them was not acceptable nor a “reasonable timeframe” as dictated by consumer law.
So, with a bunch of travel imminent, I bought a big external USB-C battery and kept it constantly connected as without it the battery percentage went down faster than the minutes ticked over. I could sort it out once I was back from travel.
So, I’m back. In fact, I drove back from a weekend away and finally bit the bullet – I went to pick up a phone who’s manufacturer has a reputation of supporting their hardware.
I picked up an iPhone.
I figured I should write up how, why, my reasons, and experiences in switching phone platforms. I think my next post will be “Why iPhone and not a different Android”.
Not being afraid to completely brick a phone is a good thing, and lets you go and play with a bunch of cool stuff.
There’s the well known cyanogenmod project – which does awesome things like have a more recent Android build for a Galaxy Nexus than what google provides.
To flash it, you’re usually told to go grab Clockwork Recovery image. This works fine to erase everything and flash Cyanogenmod (or others). However, if you want to run your phone with encryption and apply OTA updates, you’re out of luck.
Luckily there exists the Team Win Recovery Project, specifically this version (2.6.3.2 for the Galaxy Nexus) which can actually decrypt the storage from current Cyanogenmod/Android builds to apply updates, do backups etc.
It appears that it’s now possible to update your ROM without having to tether it to a computer and do a dance with adb and tmpfs. yay.
I picked one up for $3 from OfficeWorks and wanted to put pictures on it.
So… I could list (and get) the default photos with gphoto2 (shipped with Fedora 20 it just worked): gphoto2 -L (list), -P (get all).
It turns out that the images are 128×128 PNGs! Easy: change resolution in GIMP of a picture I want, and then “gphoto2 -u filename.png” sent it to the device.
A while ago (April) I bought a Pogoplug with the explicit idea of using it as a NAS device. I finally bought a new 2TB drive and plugged in the pogoplug. I pretty much instantly realised I was going to run Debian on it instead, if only because that’s what makes me comfortable: Debian, ssh and XFS.
Installing Debian was easy (google it) and incredible props for not only an attractive looking device, but an easily hackable one (the default software is probably quite good for non-experts… I just happen to want Debian).
So it has been a long time since I’ve shot film… and it pretty much was always colour. Part of this was in prep for Burning Man. i.e. how to take a photo in the dark (and part was “hey, what cool tricks can I do”).
Reading up on film, I found Ilford Delta 3200 Professional as something that could be interesting to shoot with. I’d read a bit about it, checked out the flickr group and decided what the heck, it’s only money.
I grabbed my dad’s old Ricoh SLR and took some photos – trying to learn how this film responds, what I can and can’t do with it along with developing my own skills.
I got Michaels to develop and scan (hey, they do B&W processing in Melbourne in a reasonable time frame)… ignoring the advice of some that doing it yourself gets you best results (anyone for a Laundry/Brewery/Darkroom?)
While at Rrose, I took this shot which I quite like:
If you look at full size you see the wonderful graininess that is this film:
But a simple GIMP Despeckle gets you:
(and a much smaller JPEG file size). But I do kinda like the speckle.
The amazing thing to note is that this was shot handheld with a not particularly fast lens and without any artificial light beyond what was at rrose at 9 or 10pm in August.
but I’m going to write it anyway…. “I think this is the best phone I’ve ever owned”. It’s about a device running Windows Mobile. Would I say it was “good”… hrrm… not sure… “okay” at least. It would be “very good” if syncing with my Linux desktop worked remotely easily.
One thing i love is that from the home screen (Welcome screen in WM5 language) you can start typing and you can choose to either dial that number, or choose from the search of your address book that just happened. Awesome. No jumping through menus just to search the address book!
If anyone knows how to make the in-built email client not do outlook style “include message in reply” and instead actually quote the message, i’d be rather grateful.
fring is also a rather cool IM/VoIP app that I can see myself making a fair bit of use of when on a WiFi network around the place (and IM on the go over GPRS).
I just have to go and get a 3G SIM card to make data work…
When in the throphy room and Hermione keeps telling you to cast Reducto, don’t (she is, in fact, very wrong). Instead, think about what should be in the cabinets you’re repairing.
Today, immediately after lunch, I got IO errors from my laptop hard drive (ironically while attempting a file system dump). Words to the affect of “oh gosh and bother” exiting my mouth and the decision was made to go get a new drive.
Well… one “shortcut” to the computer store later, have new HD (will travel).
Backup from previous night, xfsrestore here I come. And a good number of hours later… about 1.5million files restored.
I do wish file systems had REPEATABLE_READ though… that would be nice.
