The collected works of kev009

pipeline wrote: Look at your ethernet and TR cards very carefully. 100 mbit cards are fairly uncommon, and they can go for quite a lot of money on e-bay. (Conversely, 10 and 4/16 cards aren't worth a bent nickel.)

Not very rare for the two I know in existence.

The Olicom 10/100 card is the only one that works in PS/2s (and definitely not AIX 1.3). The card is an ISA chipset bridged to MCA, and most PS/2 users aren't very fond of it. For this reason, people might have one just to have it, but the performance difference over the high-end 10 mbit cards is marginal and comes with high CPU usage.

On the other hand, there is the 9-K for RS/6000 machines. This is a PCI chipset bridged to MCA. It is fantastic in RS/6000 machines, and most PS/2 users don't purchase them because a driver and ADF has never been written for the PS/2.

Check sig for my RS/6000 collection. I also had a 7043-140 (43p) and 7044-270 (44p) since passed on. MCA RS/6k are the only boxes I actively search for.

At one point I had a ton of PS/2s: 11 8595 and 9595, a 9576 Lacuna, PC Server 720 (6x Pentium SMP microchannel/PCI), and all sorts of accessories for them. They are now in the hands of another Comp.Sys.Ibm.Ps2.Hardware member, though I do wish I kept the P/390 to throw in an RS/6000.

I use various System x/xSeries at home and work for different purposes.

AIX 5.3 will run on PReP, but it is getting quite close to its official end of life.

NetBSD has very good PReP support if you need a maintained free OS.

GeneratriX wrote: Should we ask to one of the Moderators to move the whole SOG relevant sub-thread to The Octane Hardware Aggregator or anything else? I know, it was my fault to ask here! Sorry, khalidschofield!

Add this link to wherever it is moved to:
http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/sog/

eMGee wrote: I'd say the qualitative spirit of IBM died somewhere in the 1970s, since then they've been not much worse or better than M$ in my book.

Blasphemy! Kill him with fire!

But seriously, POWER has blown everything away for a long time now. SPARC and Itanium aren't even competitive in performance. If you absolutely need the fastest systems money can buy, IBM delivers. Just because it doesn't get featured in movies doesn't mean it isn't an interesting platform. AIX is a solid operating system, albeit it is probably only intended as part of a DB2, WebSphere, or Oracle stack more so than for general use these days (with the exception of government HPC). It still does have some interesting features such as HACMP and hot patching the kernel. PowerVM is the real kicker. IBM has a long lead on virtualization. Mix and match AIX, Linux, and 'i' depending on what needs and legacy apps you need to support. Also, the xlC compiler is top notch.

In general, I find IBM gear nice to work with once you've learned the tricks. It may lack some of the personality of SGI, but I've never found quality lacking in the high end IBM gear. Sure, the PC biz went south after the PS/2, and there were a couple mediocre RS/6000s like the 43p but that was also a sub-$5k workstation. Modern X servers are pretty nice IMHO - I place IBM and HP on level ground at the top of the heap.

eMGee wrote: Oh sure, at a gazillion gigahertz, with tons of cache memories and slurping power, elegant like a super-charged old-timer. (In other words: Let's just not compare instructions per watt, that would be rather painful.)

I find claims such as the above similar to what x86/-64 freaks love to boast, about their ‘bigger, better’ Linux ‘super computers.’

I'm not sure where you're going here or what prejudice you base this on. Clock speed and cache size are major contributors to execution speed. These processors also have 12 functional units, including a vector unit, for very wide superscalar execution. They've dialed up everything that makes up a CPU to the max. What else do you want? Oracle's recent 30 million tpcM submission to the TPC required a cluster with 108 CPU packages. IBM's 10 million tpcM entry had only 24 in a single frame. Your power usage claim is baseless.

Read up on the design of POWER4 though POWER7. It's a LOT more than raw clock speed. Frank Soltis's ("father" of the AS/400) book "Fortress Rochester" has some good insight on the move to POWER4, which unified the Integer RS64 with the Floating Point POWER3. Both of these were "brainiac" processors with many functional units, short pipelines, and low clock speeds. The POWER4 was their first clock speedy processor at the expense of a longer pipeline but these are easier to design and every other CPU maker had been and still is building these so they are easier to market.

Calling POWER7 a "super-charged old timer" is silly. POWER has significantly influenced or introduced: RISC, superscalar architecture, SMT/"hyperthreading", multpackage, multicore, hardware virtualization, eDRAM. IBM wins because they are a tier-1 silicon manufacturer and the techniques used in their design have consistently been borrowed by other manufactures and the lower end.

To each their own.

I've been writing a http://minecraft.net server in C since the official Java bloated one chokes on 30 players and uses gigs of RAM.

I've been regularly building it on my Fuel to get compiler feedback from MIPSPro, make sure it works on Big Endian gear, and make sure I don't stray too far from POSIX.1-2001.

There's a lot to do but you can grab the source off of github and there's enough implemented to log players in and let them walk around. http://mc.kev009.com/craftd/

I contributed Irix build fixes for libevent-2.0 upstream, so 2.0.9 is sufficient to build with using something like this:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --with-zlib=/usr/nekoware/ ax_cv_c_float_words_bigendian=yes

Stay tuned

pentium wrote: Ooh. This isn't the fancy graphical client I would want to see running but to tout that you are running a minecraft server on something like an SGI would be explicitly cool.
I wonder waht kind of fancy optimizations we could come up with.

The basis of the project is libevent, which in turn uses the Irix /dev/poll functionality that appeared in 6.5.15 and makes servicing a large number of clients much faster. I posted a couple weeks ago that my fixes for libevent 2.0 got accepted, so this is available to any apps that make use of it.

Beyond that, I'm trying to stick to POSIX.1-2001 so it runs well on all platforms and can't think of anything in Irix that would explicitly worthy of conditional code. Set phasers to stun.. er, set compilers to optimize and be done with it .

All said, an OpenGL client could easily be done in C or C++ that would work fine on older boxes unlike the bloated official Java one.

Any idea what is happening to other pieces of gear?

If you hunt around on ps-2.kev009.com in RSINFO you may be able to find what you need on the RAM.

You should be able to get it booting an easily available version of AIX like 4.3.3. You may be able to find the FRU for the serial dongles in RSINFO, I've seen them on ebay in the past.

I would assume there is some proprietary stuff, either connectors or bus protocol, that give this adapter control over power/keyboard/video/mouse of the x86 xserver. It must run an RTOS or cut down Linux depending on age that serve up the HTTP and IPMI capabilities. It's basically a single board computer.. a computer in your computer the same way IPMI and other OOB systems are. If that sounds scary, it is.

Hi,

I am trying to build out a "full" gbrick rack. I am looking for 6 more Origin 300s or 8 Origin 350s. I'm located in the Southwest USA and can drive quite a ways for the right haul.

Ubuntu 16.04 worked as easy as x86 on my P6 p520, granted I am booting under VIOS which may make things easier. I am working to fix FreeBSD ppc64 right now for VIOS and eventually PAPR as a hobby project. I'm using some spare work hours to bring FreeBSD to P8 PowerNV as it may be commercially relevant with Xeon E5 stagnating on I/O and memory bandwidth.

I'm still looking for now up to 5 O300s or up to 8 350s.

Mopar got me hooked up, well tested and pleasant to deal with as always.

If you're in the US I might be interested in the PCI shoebox