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Super Mario Sunshine in 4K on POWER9

How to build the Super Mario Sunshine PC port natively on a POWER9 (ppc64le) Fedora machine, add 4K textures and HD cutscenes, and set it up for 4K play.

Everything lives in ~/sms-p9/. The game reads its files from ~/sms-p9/sms-pc-port.

What this was tested on

Installing Chimera Linux (ppc64, big-endian) on a QEMU/libvirt VM

This documents a from-scratch install of Chimera Linux on a pseries QEMU/KVM VM running on a POWER9 host, with a PReP boot partition and GRUB (powerpc-ieee1275 target).

Verification status: the GRUB/PReP step (grub-install /dev/vda1) and overall flow have been run for real and reported straightforward. Package names and dinit-specific commands below are verified against Chimera's actual repo and official docs, but the full sequence hasn't been run

Installing Arch POWER (ppc64 (big-endian) or ppc64le (little-endian)) on a QEMU/libvirt VM

This documents a from-scratch install of Arch POWER Linux distribution on a pseries QEMU/KVM VM running on a POWER9 host, with a PReP boot partition and GRUB (powerpc-ieee1275 target). It also captures every pitfall hit along the way — each one cost real debugging time, so they're called out explicitly rather than silently avoided.

Endianness note: this was run and verified end-to-end on powerpc64 (big-endian). Arch POWER also publishes a powerpc64le (little-endian)

JIT: value left live on the opStack is corrupted across a taken conditional branch (all backends)

Summary

When a value is left live on the QVM opStack across a conditional branch and the branch is taken, the compiled VM can return a wrong result. The bytecode interpreter produces the correct value. Reproduces on current master (fe57ee9) on all three JIT backends — x86_64 (vm_x86.c), aarch64 (vm_aarch64.c) and ppc64le (vm_powerpc.c) — deterministically, with a 13-instruction function: no data input, no syscalls, no undefined behaviour.

NaCl SFI Design for ppc64le

Overview

Google Native Client (NaCl) uses Software Fault Isolation (SFI) to sandbox untrusted native code. Each supported architecture has a unique SFI implementation. The closest existing analogy for ppc64le is the MIPS 32-bit port: both use fixed-length instructions, pure software isolation (no hardware segments), and dedicated mask registers.

NaCl currently supports: x86-32 (hardware segments), x86-64 (base register + zero-extension), ARM 32-bit (bic masking), and MIPS 32-bit (mask registers). No PPC support has ever existed.

Common SFI Invariants (All Architectures)

Installing GOG Games on Unsupported Architecture with Native MojoSetup

GOG's Linux game installers (.sh files) are Makeself archives that bundle a custom mojosetup binary (x86_64) to handle the installation UI and file extraction. On non-x86 architectures like PPC64LE or RISCV, the bundled binary won't run natively. This document describes how to compile mojosetup from source for your architecture and use it to run any GOG .sh installer, with support for stdio, ncurses (TUI), GTK2, GTK3, and GTK4 (graphical) interfaces.

Background

test_vinsertd.c:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <altivec.h>
typedef union {
    vector unsigned char v;
    uint64_t u64[2];
    uint32_t u32[4];

SIMD Optimization Plan for the Software Renderer

This document covers the feasibility analysis and implementation plan for adding SIMD acceleration to the Yamagi Quake II software renderer (src/client/refresh/soft/).

	# op-build (open-power) vs Raptor downstream — comparison

	Date: 2026-05-11
	Our tree: `~/Work/op-build` on branch `bump-linux-6.12.87` / `amdgpu-navi23` (forks from open-power/op-build master @ `59464d53`)
	Raptor tree: `~/Work/op-build-blackbird` at tag `raptor-v2.10` (Feb 15, 2024)

	Raptor repo URLs:
	- `gitlab.raptorengineering.com/openpower-firmware/machine-talos-ii/op-build.git` (used by our local clone)
	- `gitlab.raptorengineering.com/openpower-firmware/machine-blackbird/op-build.git` (Blackbird-specific variant, shares most code)