Re: ATLAS on PowerPC
On Jul 4, 2012, at 3:02 PM, David Adcock wrote: Also I recently purchased a (used) G5-2.3GHz-2Core. Probably MANY of these units will be coming on the market as leases expire, etc. An earlier post appears to be completely correct: Debian on the 64-bit architecture does not seem to be well supported. The unix-ish part of the machine seems to run quite well (and FAST!), but high-order features - mainly nouveau - are nowhere near working, so I have to ssh into it and run exclusively via command line. Alas, most of these G5 Macs have the GeForce 6600 card, and may be condemned to inadequate nouveau support -or- purchase of a non-nVidia graphics card. Hi Dave, This worries me. I have a similar machine. Currently it's running MacOS-X, but I plan to convert it to Debian soon. As with yours, it has the GeForce 6600 card. Do you have a recommendation for what video card I should get to replace it? My video needs are minimal, I just need to be able to run iceweasel and xterm and a few 2D-gui system administration packages. Thanks! Rick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/2290f1c2-da6a-45f1-ac8f-e052d9a0f...@pobox.com
Re: ATLAS on PowerPC
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 05.07.2012 17:35, Rick Thomas wrote: Hi Dave, This worries me. I have a similar machine. Currently it's running MacOS-X, but I plan to convert it to Debian soon. As with yours, it has the GeForce 6600 card. Do you have a recommendation for what video card I should get to replace it? My video needs are minimal, I just need to be able to run iceweasel and xterm and a few 2D-gui system administration packages. Thanks! Rick Hi, Just test it out first. I got a nvidia 6600 card in my G5, running gnome-shell without much problems. Sometimes things glitch out, but thats related to me running testing and experimental stuff, usually problems go away by waiting one week and update again (or better, report the bugsi promise to do that more often :-p ) HP - -- This address only accepts mail from debian mailing lists. Everything else is sent to /dev/null -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.17 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk/1u1sACgkQjLvx8ViUjYIOrgCff9Sz48xQKrZtDHslSPHSJxFk W9oAnjk8pMkEu9NobzgL3pHvVr59AL76 =lQsr -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4ff5bb5e.2000...@spahan.ch
Re: ATLAS on PowerPC
On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 7:26 PM, Sébastien Villemot sebastien.ville...@ens.fr wrote: [please keep the bug in Cc:, I’m not subscribed to the list] Dear PowerPC porters, As a co-maintainer of atlas, I intend to force a specific PowerPC CPU architecture when the package is built on buildds (in order to fix #680096). Atlas gives me the following options: POWER3, POWER4, POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, PPCG4, PPCG5. I would like to know which one of these is the most generic architecture, so that the atlas package thus modified will work on all supported machines. I guess this is either POWER3 or PPCG4, but it is as i know prof. C. Whaley (atlas author) is going to remove the support for a lot of old power architecture machines. nello -- Power Mac G4 AGP 450MHz - CRUX PPC (32bit) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CABMX=WxQE+rvWf8VHoEYpTyrN9kq36-0t==upspghnqwrct...@mail.gmail.com
Re: ATLAS on PowerPC
On Thursday, July 05, 2012 10:35:45 AM Rick Thomas wrote: On Jul 4, 2012, at 3:02 PM, David Adcock wrote: Also I recently purchased a (used) G5-2.3GHz-2Core. Probably MANY of these units will be coming on the market as leases expire, etc. An earlier post appears to be completely correct: Debian on the 64-bit architecture does not seem to be well supported. The unix-ish part of the machine seems to run quite well (and FAST!), but high-order features - mainly nouveau - are nowhere near working, so I have to ssh into it and run exclusively via command line. Alas, most of these G5 Macs have the GeForce 6600 card, and may be condemned to inadequate nouveau support -or- purchase of a non-nVidia graphics card. Hi Dave, This worries me. I have a similar machine. Currently it's running MacOS-X, but I plan to convert it to Debian soon. As with yours, it has the GeForce 6600 card. Do you have a recommendation for what video card I should get to replace it? My video needs are minimal, I just need to be able to run iceweasel and xterm and a few 2D-gui system administration packages. Thanks! Rick Hi Rick- All of the Late 2005 MacTowers came with the GeForce 6600. I actually have two of these machines - one that I bought new (OSX 10.4 [Tiger] used for video editing), and the used one described above. The used machine came with OSX 10.5 (Leopard) installed, and it runs perfectly, which is how I know that this is not a hardware problem. In the used machine, I unplugged the original (Leopard) drive and installed a 1Tb drive for Debian. I do NOT want to make it a dual boot machine, but want to preserve the ability to run OSX. Like you, all I want is a desktop - no game-playing, no zippy acceleration needed, just a desktop (one that actually works.) In answer to your question, the G4 I mentioned in the original post has an ATI Rage128 video card (PCI), and is currently running squeeze. It runs slowly, but has not exhibited any other problem (other than the SIGILL problem that is probably a file permission problem in GAMESS.) The fact that the (2000-vintage) ATI card works makes me think that a 2006-2007-vintage Radeon PCIe controller would work with BOTH OSX and the Debian/ati driver on the G5. That's what I plan to try; I am in Austin and there are several sources of older equipment here. Another possible research area is to look at the early Mac-intel machines to find out which PCIe video card they used, and try one of those. If I find a card that works, I'll update this thread; hope that you will do the same. Caveat: Some complaints about the ati driver appear on lists.debian.org, but AMD has always been very cooperative with opensource, so I expect that the problems refer to more recent cards that have not really had enough time to get a mature driver. On a side note, if you intend to do scientific computing with your G5, a posting on this thread reports that support for ATLAS on the PowerPC architecture may be ended soon. I plan to get source for it ASAP. Cheers, Dave -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201207051537.54493.david.adc...@lonestarbio.com
Re: ATLAS on PowerPC
On Thursday, July 05, 2012 11:05:50 AM HP wrote: On 05.07.2012 17:35, Rick Thomas wrote: Hi Dave, This worries me. I have a similar machine. Currently it's running MacOS-X, but I plan to convert it to Debian soon. As with yours, it has the GeForce 6600 card. Do you have a recommendation for what video card I should get to replace it? My video needs are minimal, I just need to be able to run iceweasel and xterm and a few 2D-gui system administration packages. Thanks! Rick Hi, Just test it out first. I got a nvidia 6600 card in my G5, running gnome-shell without much problems. Sometimes things glitch out, but thats related to me running testing and experimental stuff, usually problems go away by waiting one week and update again (or better, report the bugsi promise to do that more often :-p ) HP Hi HP- Thanks for your note. All that I have seen since the first boot after installation is the lower rightmost login splash in the lower right corner of the screen (about a quarter of the screen wide.) Maybe this can explain it: are you running gdm3? (That appears to be the default manager after install.) Also, do you have any observations about MDM? xdm? Thanks, Dave -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201207051606.32660.david.adc...@lonestarbio.com
ATLAS on PowerPC
[please keep the bug in Cc:, I’m not subscribed to the list] Dear PowerPC porters, As a co-maintainer of atlas, I intend to force a specific PowerPC CPU architecture when the package is built on buildds (in order to fix #680096). Atlas gives me the following options: POWER3, POWER4, POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, PPCG4, PPCG5. I would like to know which one of these is the most generic architecture, so that the atlas package thus modified will work on all supported machines. I guess this is either POWER3 or PPCG4, but it is unclear to me which one is more generic. Or maybe none of the two encompasses the other, in which case I would like to know which one would be the best choice from your point of view. BTW, if you could answer the same question concerning the ppc64 and powerpcspe ports, that would be great. Thanks a lot, -- Sébastien Villemot Researcher in Economics Debian Maintainer http://www.dynare.org/sebastien Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594 pgpg6sfouilbT.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: ATLAS on PowerPC
On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 07:26:00PM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote: [please keep the bug in Cc:, I’m not subscribed to the list] Dear PowerPC porters, As a co-maintainer of atlas, I intend to force a specific PowerPC CPU architecture when the package is built on buildds (in order to fix #680096). Atlas gives me the following options: POWER3, POWER4, POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, PPCG4, PPCG5. I would like to know which one of these is the most generic architecture, so that the atlas package thus modified will work on all supported machines. I guess this is either POWER3 or PPCG4, but it is unclear to me which one is more generic. Or maybe none of the two encompasses the other, in which case I would like to know which one would be the best choice from your point of view. POWER3 is 64-bit. PPCG4 is 32-bit, but it requires the use of Altivec instructions, which G3 processors do not have. So the answer is that neither of these is acceptable by default. For example, neither of these would work on my iBook. Is there a reason that you cannot use the defaults of the compiler? Also, POWER and PowerPC are two very similar architectures. In general, they each have a few instructions that the other does not, but there is a large common subset that is generally what Debian uses. POWER 3 and newer support all of the PowerPC instruction set. However, if you use a POWER setting, you need to be sure that it does not include instructions that only POWER processors have, or it will not work on PowerPC processors. BTW, if you could answer the same question concerning the ppc64 and powerpcspe ports, that would be great. I don't know enough here to have an opinion, sorry. -- brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US +1 832 623 2791 | http://www.crustytoothpaste.net/~bmc | My opinion only OpenPGP: RSA v4 4096b: 88AC E9B2 9196 305B A994 7552 F1BA 225C 0223 B187 signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#680096: ATLAS on PowerPC
brian m. carlson sand...@crustytoothpaste.net writes: POWER3 is 64-bit. But still POWER3 is supported by the 32-bit powerpc port: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/powerpc/ch02s01.html.en#id522279 PPCG4 is 32-bit, but it requires the use of Altivec instructions, which G3 processors do not have. So the answer is that neither of these is acceptable by default. My understanding is that POWER3 does not have Altivec, so it may therefore be the best option. Is there a reason that you cannot use the defaults of the compiler? Yes, it has to do with the Atlas build system which does CPU detection and timings at compile time, and which is quite intricate (to say the least). -- Sébastien Villemot Researcher in Economics Debian Maintainer http://www.dynare.org/sebastien Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594 pgpODDG5YWQXl.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: ATLAS on PowerPC
Of the options given, PPCG4 is the most non-specific. From: Sébastien Villemot sebastien.ville...@ens.fr To: debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org Cc: 680...@bugs.debian.org Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2012 1:26 PM Subject: ATLAS on PowerPC [please keep the bug in Cc:, I’m not subscribed to the list] Dear PowerPC porters, As a co-maintainer of atlas, I intend to force a specific PowerPC CPU architecture when the package is built on buildds (in order to fix #680096). Atlas gives me the following options: POWER3, POWER4, POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, PPCG4, PPCG5. I would like to know which one of these is the most generic architecture, so that the atlas package thus modified will work on all supported machines. I guess this is either POWER3 or PPCG4, but it is unclear to me which one is more generic. Or maybe none of the two encompasses the other, in which case I would like to know which one would be the best choice from your point of view. BTW, if you could answer the same question concerning the ppc64 and powerpcspe ports, that would be great. Thanks a lot, -- Sébastien Villemot Researcher in Economics Debian Maintainer http://www.dynare.org/sebastien Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
Re: Bug#680096: ATLAS on PowerPC
On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 09:39:37PM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote: But still POWER3 is supported by the 32-bit powerpc port: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/powerpc/ch02s01.html.en#id522279 Debian powerpc is 32bit, but with 64bit kernel available. Debian 64bit powerpc is a new project and not yet anywhere close to a supported port as far as I know. Most code probably doesn't benefit from 64bit on powerpc (it is not like amd64 at all), and would only gain in memory space for applications by going 64bit to my knowledge. My understanding is that POWER3 does not have Altivec, so it may therefore be the best option. Unless of course it has other instructions that the G4 doesn't have. Yes, it has to do with the Atlas build system which does CPU detection and timings at compile time, and which is quite intricate (to say the least). It looks like they used to have 604e support, which is about as generic as a powerpc gets (32bit, no altivec, etc). Someone commented it out though. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120704205310.ga19...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Re: Bug#680096: ATLAS on PowerPC
Lennart Sorensen lsore...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca writes: On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 09:39:37PM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote: My understanding is that POWER3 does not have Altivec, so it may therefore be the best option. Unless of course it has other instructions that the G4 doesn't have. Looking again at Atlas build-system (in CONFIG/src/atlcomp.txt), it is clear that POWER3 is the less specific. In particular it gets no CPU-specific GCC flags, contrary to G4 (which gets -maltivec -mabi=altivec -mcpu=7400 -mtune=7400). So I am going to enforce POWER3. Thanks everyone for your feedback. -- Sébastien Villemot Researcher in Economics Debian Maintainer http://www.dynare.org/sebastien Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594 pgpcySfXSG73Z.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: ATLAS on PowerPC
The easy answer to this query is: How many used Macs are/will be coming on the market? That's where the numbers will be. I have a Mac G4-350MHz, and with lenny was able to get 760Mflops from the BLAS/ATLAS libs via AltiVec. Squeeze appears to run well, though the GAMESS molecular modeling program has some SIGILL issue (may well be my own oversight - still testing.) Also I recently purchased a (used) G5-2.3GHz-2Core. Probably MANY of these units will be coming on the market as leases expire, etc. An earlier post appears to be completely correct: Debian on the 64-bit architecture does not seem to be well supported. The unix-ish part of the machine seems to run quite well (and FAST!), but high-order features - mainly nouveau - are nowhere near working, so I have to ssh into it and run exclusively via command line. Alas, most of these G5 Macs have the GeForce 6600 card, and may be condemned to inadequate nouveau support -or- purchase of a non-nVidia graphics card. Cordially, Dave --- Dr. David Adcock Lone Star Biotechnologies www.lonestarbio.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201207041702.34358.david.adc...@lonestarbio.com
