Hello, There are multiple replies below.
On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 11:43 AM, Matthew Thode <[email protected]> wrote: > I have access to it (can spin up servers and whatnot), but it doesn't > sound like that's what you are looking for (needing a non-virtualized > system). What specific features are you looking for? > > Are you looking for rack space to put a donated IBM system in or what? > I'm not certian what you are looking for. > My apologies, I tried to be comprehensive in my original post but it may have come out confused. I felt as if I did something bad and was trying to make sure I told someone right away, like my parents taught me. I am looking to verify that my request for shipping reimbursement could not be made superfluous. It looks like physical access to a system is necessary to continue doing most of the novel things I am interested in. Firstly I want to interact with the system firmware. This may only be possible with POWER8 systems. With the failure of the TALOS workstation crowdfunding effort it looks like I will not be able to do this soon. I intend to see what I can do to reverse engineer the motherboard firmware on a donated Power6+ system if/when I receive it. Secondly I wish to instrument PowerKVM and the newer PowerPC hypervisor functions, specifically related to processor power management, processor configuration, and memory model. The user mode SIMD/decimal128 instructions are also extremely interesting. Lastly I would like to run a Tinderbox targeting ppc64(le) to try to follow up on some build failures I've been having. On the systems I have access to at the moment I have been caught up in prefix/RAP failures while trying to set up a development environment otherwise I would have started following up on my latter interests. A shell account on a ppc64le machine running Gentoo would likely be enough. It would save me a lot of time. Otherwise I can wait until I receive a donated Power6+ machine, some way or another. > I'm on irc (as prometheanfire) if you want to talk. > I will try to remember that, but unfortunately I have less time to be on IRC now. Setting up a bouncer is on my list and I will get to it. On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 1:37 PM, Robin H. Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: > Have you seen this page on this wiki? > https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Infrastructure/Developer_Machines > > Did you reach out to anybody there for access? > No sir, my apologies for my confusion. I am not very smart and it has been hard to find information that might aid me in contributing to Gentoo. Much to my dismay useful information is usually available. I genuinely do not mean to ask useless questions. On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 3:30 PM, James Le Cuirot <[email protected]> wrote: > As of a few months ago, we have two POWER8 guests, one big endian > (timberdoodle) and one little endian (bogsucker). We would just have > one but you can't mix big and little endian on the same system. > > After the old POWER7 timberdoodle died, I was responsible for creating > these new instances with some help from prometheanfire. Replacing > CentOS systems that had tied up all the storage from the other side of > the world with no direct raw access was an interesting challenge! > > I didn't intend to manage the systems long term though as I only use > them for building and testing Java stuff. I consider prometheanfire, > blueness, and vapier to be in charge though you may struggle getting > hold of the latter two. > > We generally only give access to devs but I am aware of one exception > we made for gnu_andrew, who works for Red Hat and provides our icedtea > ebuilds. Unfortunately I've only seen you on this list but hopefully > someone can vouch for you. I don't know whether these guests will be > suitable for your needs though. > I understand. Requesting resources on behalf of Gentoo was a line I was not willing to cross myself. It seems I misunderstood what desultory told me to do. The best I can offer is an explanation for what I wish to do and how it may end up impacting Gentoo in a positive way. Already my "work" (attempting to run bootstrap-rap.sh) on GCC112, GCC's ppc64le Linux system, has led to a number of bugs for the prefix and RAP projects. If I had use of a Gentoo ppc64le system I would likely be able to increase the stability of those architectures as I attempt to do normal things. This is the basis I used to request shipping reimbursement for a donated POWER6+ server. The tracker has some bugs I have submitted and others I have commented on (I would link to them but I haven't figured out how to find all bugs by me, or all bugs that I have commented on). There are people who would recognize my name but as I said before, now a line has been crossed. I do not want to make anyone feel like I am cornering them. Respectfully, R0b0t1
