[coreboot] Where to buy the KCMA-D8? *brand new*

Timothy Pearson tpearson at raptorengineering.com
Mon Jun 12 18:28:34 CEST 2017


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On 06/11/2017 01:09 PM, Johnysecured88 wrote:
> The problem is there are no heavy duty apps for the power arch.
> Photoshop, Premiere, All Adobe apps, all Autocad/3ds max, the list goes
> on an on.

Respectfully, if you are using those applications, you have far larger
issues to worry about than whether the underlying system can be owner
controlled -- you have zero control over the application layer and
(probably) the kernel and firmware due to the increasing DRM
requirements for those applications.

That being said, as POWER systems become more widespread I expect ports
of big name software to become available; at least software that already
had a Linux port.  For others, the best course of action is really to
somehow get development of the competing open source solution off the
ground and up to feature parity with the commercial offering(s) -- by
the time you get a vendor's attention with a multi-million dollar
proposition, you could just directly fund development of one of the open
source packages and bring it up to a high degree of polish.

 I myself am building an opteron server build but I also plan
> on taking you up on the upcoming offering.
> 
> The question is, what options are there for running x86 on power9? If
> there were a good performing emulation layer it would be great. Ive seen
> the qemu demo and it doesnt seem to be on par with normal
> virtualizations. Ive heard of hardware assisted emulation but I dont
> believe power9 chips will have that?

POWER has had hardware virtualization extensions since at *least*
POWER7, and IIRC significantly before that.  However, they help POWER
run on POWER, and do not directly help x86 run on POWER.

The biggest issue with QEMU cross-arch emulation for heavy-duty apps is
really the fact that there is no direct mapping of vector instructions.
 If someone could invest the $$$ needed to make that happen, x86 apps
could run with only a several time slowdown versus the hundredfold or
more slowdown due to guest vector instructions being serialised on the
host platform.  There are a few demos from some Chinese researchers
exploring this idea (x86-->ARM), and the results are very impressive.

Of course, if you start relying on this for anything other than academic
purposes you *might* run into the same legal problem that prevents the
manufacture of non-Intel and non-AMD x86 chips -- you'd be using the
patented, copyrighted x86 instruction set without the express permission
of Intel.  The reason I say "might" is that if your x86 apps are old
enough, or support an old enough version of the x86 instruction set, you
might be able to use a modified version of QEMU that avoids any patent
infringement and still have your x86 application(s) run.

- -- 
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
+1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line)
+1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard)
https://www.raptorengineering.com
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