| 10 Mar 2026 |
 Aelin | so, ppc64 VMs are special because they basically scan all disks (which should use MBR, but SLOF can also handle GPT) for a ppc prep boot partition, which is the partition that GRUB is installed to | 16:14:24 |
| Aelin | the prep boot partition needs to be marked as bootable | 16:14:34 |
| Aelin | this is entirely unlike any physical ppc64 hardware which in OPAL just all use petitboot to my knowledge | 16:15:05 |
| 11 Mar 2026 |
|  @somasis:matrix.org left the room. | 03:49:38 |
 Stas | 
Download 1000005234.jpg | 19:31:35 |
| Stas | Burn in test in progress | 19:31:54 |
| Stas | Once complete, I will finally get to build some nixos | 19:32:10 |
| Stas | One of the ram sticks was slotted in badly | 19:33:27 |
| Stas | Reseating got my 16g back | 19:33:42 |
 Puna | 4x as much real RAM as i have, so building everything might be alot faster for you 😅 | 19:35:44 |
| Puna | 
Download image.png | 19:36:02 |
| Stas | :D | 19:36:41 |
| Puna | (add ~ 1d or so to that elapsed build time, hit an openssl regression p early that required a PR) | 19:37:13 |
| Stas | I have 2 chinese sticks left and original ones. Can ship them to you | 19:37:42 |
| Aelin | if it helps any of you for development I can spin up some more ppc64 VMs on POWER8 hw like I did for amaan | 19:38:20 |
| Stas |
https://a.aliexpress.com/_EQNbDhE | 19:38:21 |
| Stas | Got 10 of these from ali | 19:38:31 |
| Puna | might come back to you on that when i have less other things that i need to do. the slow pace of these builds helps me w/ not putting too many hours at a time into this ^^" | 19:46:18 |
| Aelin | sure, feel free to DM me at any time :) | 19:47:25 |
| Stas | what is the best way to get nix going to build nixos? I see mostly Adelie, Debian or Gentoo | 19:52:49 |
| Stas | no instructions on usb booting adelie though | 19:53:03 |
| Stas | burning a CD is last resort :D | 19:53:17 |
| Puna | adelie i remember having some kernel issue with at some point | 19:53:49 |
| Stas | seems for all of them it is a matter of dd -ing the image and using boot usb0/disk:,\\:tbxi at OF prompt | 19:55:43 |
| Puna | git.adelielinux.org/adelie/packages/-/issues/1315 | 19:56:23 |
| Stas | I downloaded it first for some reason. :D | 19:56:12 |
| Puna | https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/ has some recent snapshots for ppc64 sid | 19:58:21 |
| Stas | Anna Wilcox needs some G5 HW :) | 19:57:23 |
| Puna | adelie shouldn't be too special w/r/t usb booting. if your model natively supports booting from USB, then holding Alt / Option should eventually show the installer on the USB. if it doesn't, then you'll have to enter Open Firmware via Super+Alt+O+F / Command+Option+O+F and instructing the firmware to boot some path on the usb disk | 20:05:31 |
| Puna | p much yeah | 20:05:46 |
