Posts by jhamby@chaos.social
(DIR) Post #AQaO2oelaoKqvUvWy0 by jhamby@chaos.social
2022-11-17T04:20:56Z
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CoreMark-Pro is also a simple way for me to see how much "-O3" is faster than "-O2" and whether Clang has become better than GCC on G4 or not (at least for Clang 14.0.6 vs. GCC 10.4.0, NetBSD's system gcc). I also want to add "-mno-altivec" to verify that both compilers are using the AltiVec registers and instructions, which should be particularly helpful for video codecs, Internet encryption, and the usual things SIMD is good at. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instruction,_multiple_data
(DIR) Post #AQaO2qLLJzzE9pr2y8 by jhamby@chaos.social
2022-11-17T04:24:11Z
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On my #Itanium blade server (rx2620), I'm going to try CoreMark-Pro tomorrow from Gentoo Linux (where GCC's "-O3" will probably crash with an internal error like it did almost immediately when I tried to build packages with it) and then boot into #OpenVMS to see just how much better the Intel-supplied code generator is.On Itanium VMS, the C++ compiler tends to generate better code than the C compiler, counterintuitively, because HP decided to use Intel's EDG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Design_Group) frontend.
(DIR) Post #AQaO2s8IfSk3hxleuu by jhamby@chaos.social
2022-11-17T04:27:17Z
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So when you build a C++ program on OpenVMS/ia64, you get Intel's Itanium frontend and backend, but the C compiler has the DEC/HP frontend and Itanium code generator. The x86-64 port that's just been released (there'll be a hobbyist version as soon as they've finished porting the native compilers) is using Clang as the C/C++ frontend and LLVM as the code generator, with a GEM->IR translator for the DEC/HP compiler frontends that emit GEM intermediate code. Tech talk here: https://youtu.be/AD25V21zsak
(DIR) Post #AQaO2tfewv1KTiNoYK by jhamby@chaos.social
2022-11-17T04:37:44Z
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The Itanium is a strange CPU that made sense for OpenVMS to run on 15-20 years ago because it's designed for server applications. Intel didn't really think 64-bit CPUs were going to be mainstream and they were initially dismissive of the AMD64 extension to x86, which first shipped in April 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64Just a few years later, Intel had to admit defeat (as far as making Itanium an "industry-standard" CPU, as they'd originally hoped it'd be) and licensed AMD64 for their own CPUs.
(DIR) Post #AQaO2vGZ1C8PQSeniK by jhamby@chaos.social
2022-11-17T04:41:11Z
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The third mid-aughts system I own for testing and self-hosting purposes is a mid-2006 PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5 GHz, one of the last to roll off the assembly line, presumably. It has PCIe, 16GB ECC RAM, and I've tried Gentoo Linux, Void Linux, FreeBSD/ppc64, and I'm going to install NetBSD/macppc on a separate drive for testing purposes, as well as FreeBSD.Sadly, it's next to impossible to get FreeBSD, NetBSD, and/or Linux to coexist on the same drive. The BSDs especially will confuse each other.
(DIR) Post #AQaO2wnZJy86B76fnU by jhamby@chaos.social
2022-11-17T04:46:25Z
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I nearly forgot to mention that Linux on #PowerPC has a particularly good implementation of KVM that doesn't require the CPU to have a hypervisor. If you do have a newer POWER CPU, there's "KVM-HV", but if not, there's "KVM-PS" (for "problem state", which is IBM jargon for "user mode"), which runs the guest OS as a regular process and emulates the MMU and hardware from the KVM kernel driver.The last time I tried, though, FreeBSD/ppc64 crashed at boot when I tried to run it in QEMU/KVM.
(DIR) Post #AQaO2yJVghH2sT3hDs by jhamby@chaos.social
2022-11-17T04:52:36Z
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The #OpenVMS project that I have in mind with the NetBSD source code will be to port the bare minimum of /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, and /usr/sbin programs to install into the POSIX root directory in place of the old ports of GNU utilities, as a way to start clean and be able to use the pkgsrc packages.I started by trying to upgrade the GNV (GNU's Not VMS) ports of bash and coreutils, but both packages are quite large, and NetBSD's /bin/sh should be much faster and easier to modify to use vfork.
(DIR) Post #AVd66stutepiJzZNNw by jhamby@chaos.social
2023-05-13T22:28:26Z
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I don't plan to start using Mastodon much any time soon, but I did want to log in to post to any and all of my friends from Twitter: I deleted my Twitter account without much advance notice because the CEO of the company is a literal Nazi.Let me say the same thing a second time: Elon Musk's ideology is indistinguishable from Nazi ideology, period, full stop. Elon Musk believes in everything that Himmler did, and I couldn't deny that fact to myself any longer.
(DIR) Post #AZ6iIQKMBT3dJBIpDE by jhamby@chaos.social
2022-11-26T19:39:20Z
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Shout out to #SpeedQueen commercial washers for not losing my $1.75 when my apartment had a 10-second power cut immediately after I pressed start and my money was subtracted from the card.When the power came back up, after printing a few startup codes on the LCD, the washer started washing my clothes with the settings I'd picked like a champ. A+ recovery.
(DIR) Post #ApSRIaOX61epViezZo by jhamby@chaos.social
2024-12-27T02:27:47Z
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I deleted my X account back when it was still officially called Twitter about a year and a half ago, and I really enjoyed my sabbatical from this form of social media.Now that I've gotten a little better at time management, and especially with the popularity of Bluesky, I thought it'd be a good idea to reconnect here to see if anyone I know was still following me, and to follow other interesting people.
(DIR) Post #ApazceJzeeO6PWVULA by jhamby@chaos.social
2024-12-31T05:59:46Z
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@strypey the term for that stuff is "brain rot content". Cocomelon for little kids, then Skibidi Toilet and such.
(DIR) Post #ApvJgqTjnTLoJ3MtfM by jhamby@chaos.social
2025-01-09T22:59:01Z
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@wonka @aliss General Electric was in the nuclear weapons business too, until a consumer boycott led them to divest in 1993.https://corporateaccountability.org/blog/boycott-stops-ges-nuclear-weapons-business/
(DIR) Post #ApwrT1Pxv5ipmM8yg4 by jhamby@chaos.social
2025-01-10T08:50:01Z
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From a tech standpoint, the cool thing about IBM mainframes in general is they're really good at running VMs and VMs inside of VMs (there's a top-level hypervisor layer called "PR/SM" that you get for free, then you typically run z/VM or KVM).
(DIR) Post #ApwrT2YrfUR1KFJbBg by jhamby@chaos.social
2025-01-10T08:52:37Z
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Here's Dave Plummer from Dave's Garage visiting the IBM mainframe HQ in Rochester, NY.https://youtu.be/ouAG4vXFORc?si=oLyl54gVVHdWfgIV
(DIR) Post #ApwrT3puvZfZHQIjPE by jhamby@chaos.social
2025-01-10T08:55:08Z
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Here's Ars Technica's 2023 story on mainframes.https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/the-ibm-mainframe-how-it-runs-and-why-it-survives/The OS is EBCDIC (and ASCII and all the other code pages and Unicodes and such). When you run Linux, it's just like any other Linux but it's big-endian, which is sadly rare these days (you can shake out bugs by testing on both endians).There's an IBM mainframe you can get a free time-limited account on the mainframe at Marist, the college in Poughkeepsie, NY, where IBM's mainframe engineering is.https://linuxone.cloud.marist.edu/
(DIR) Post #ApwrTCCXpKWTDuwumm by jhamby@chaos.social
2025-01-10T08:55:50Z
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That's a LinuxONE account. You can also get free z/OS access by going through the Z Xplore self-taught classes in all the mainframe tech. That course is fascinating af, just because so much of it is so alien, but also highly optimized.
(DIR) Post #ApwrTK3Gdhr5ZSfcR6 by jhamby@chaos.social
2025-01-10T08:57:54Z
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The z16 is innovative, relative to earlier models, for having an onboard AI coprocessor, and having the 32 MB L2 cache per core that gets dynamically shared around to be used as L3 and L4 caches across cores, chips, and boards within the system.
(DIR) Post #ApwrTS1mz5QUJC2YF6 by jhamby@chaos.social
2025-01-10T09:25:47Z
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Typically you buy an IBM mainframe because you're a giant bank, insurance company, airline, etc. and that's what you've been using, and you want to run all your batch and/or interactive mainframe workloads as you've been doing them.They're DRM'd to Hell and back. Typically most of the cores are off and the customer enables the ones they've paid for. You can negotiate a cheaper price if you get the ones that can't run z/OS or any other IBM OS but "only" Linux, plus you can offload Java to it.
(DIR) Post #ApwrTfLPTRqTboJu88 by jhamby@chaos.social
2025-01-10T09:29:04Z
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IBM mainframe CPUs are the CISCiest of CISC processors. BTW, they also use POWER CPUs in the network storage arrays, which I'll get back to shortly.Not only can a 64-bit mainframe run 31-bit (don't ask), and the original 24-bit address space (with the 32nd bit to distinguish between them) address space modules, but it's a mix of all three address space lengths. 16 MB virtual memory seemed huge in the 1960s, especially after you had VMs that could have their own 16 MB. Then 31-bit, then 64.
(DIR) Post #AqpFUkqCcj9h0SzV1k by jhamby@chaos.social
2025-02-05T22:59:13Z
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"What does someone who is worth $30 billion lose if you take $29 billion from them?"https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/confiscate-their-money#economics #billionaires #capitalism