December 2021 updates - facing electronic components shortages - GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC notebook

At the beginning of December 2021 we received an update about the required electronic components that are still missing. We have a total number of 22 missing components, and some of them are present on the board multiple times such as the MOSFET (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSFET).

Below a detailed list of the missing components in more pieces:

7 per pcb MOSFET – DMN3730U-7 N 750mA 30V POWER MOS – Diodes

9 per pcb Trans MOSFET – SI4925DY P-CH 30V 5.3A 8-Pin SOIC – ON SEMICONDUCTOR

4 per pcb Field Effect Transistor –NDC7002N MOSFET 2N-CH 50V 0.51A SSOT6 – ON SEMICONDUCTOR

3 per pcb IRLML6346TRPBF – N-Channel 30 V 3.4A (Ta) 1.3W (Ta) – Infineon Technologies

2 per pcb 403C11A24M00000 24 MHz ±10ppm Crystal 10pF 60 Ohms 4-SMD

We have in the missed components even few bigger chip in the list from the more expensive and complex

Marvell 88SE9235 Sata3 controller (Two-Lane PCIe 2.0 to Four-Port 6 Gbps SATA I/O Controller)
Lattice LCMXO256C-5TN100C FPGA – series Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) LUTS 78 I/O
MICROCHIP USB2514B-AEZC I/O Controller Interface IC HI-PERFORM LW PWR SM FOOT USB 2.0 HUB
NXP Semiconductors PCAL6524HEAZ Interface – I/O Expanders PCAL6524HE

The other missed components:

MPN	REFERENCE
BAS70LT1G	D8
B340B-13-F	D12
MBR140SFT1G	D15
DM3AT-SF-PEJM5(40)	J2
DF13E-40DP-1.25V(51)	J20
SLC1175-271MEB	L58
BSR17A	Q9
S25FL256SAGMFI000	U9
AT24C256C-SSHL-B	U30
FDC6331L	U54
TPS544C20RVFT	U65
LTC4368CDD-1#PBF	U81

While ACube Systems is looking for 22 missing components contacting various distributors, we at the Power Progress Community, are trying to help searching these components. The main problem we are facing is not finding each component, the problem is the estimated delivery we are facing that most times is six month or more. For this reason we are evaluating to replace some of the components in order to get a more reasonable delivery time. In case you want to help out carrying out this task, you can the effort and conatct us.

QEMU at full speed with KVM on the NXP T2080 CPU

Thanks to Fabiano Rosas, Cédric Le Goater and Zoltan Balaton (see discussion at https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-ppc/2021-12/msg00231.html) it is now possible to launch virtual machines at nearly native speed with QEMU on our NXP T2080RDB development kit, that mount exactly the same CPU as in our laptop.

This great achievement is possible thanks to the support of KVM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine) that allows the virtual machine to directly use the CPU without the need to spend time emulating it.

KVM support for PowerPC Book3e e6500 CPUs will be first introduced starting with the linux kernel 5.16+ and with the next version of QEMU, most probably v7.0. If you want to try it now, you should get the release candidate of the kernel 5.16 and compile QEMU yourself from the GIT master branch

We successfully compiled the upcoming kernel and QEMU and then tested some virtual machines running Linux for PowerPC 64 bit in Big Endian mode. Below you can see a screenshot of QEMU running three virtual machines with KVM activated. The host system is our NXP T2080RDB devkit that runs Debian SID PPC64, then there is a VM with Debian SID PPC64 (bottom-right), then OpenSUSE Tumbleweed PPC64 (bottom-left), and finally VOID Linux PPC64 (top-right).

Please note that the KVM support to the e6500 PowerPC family is still in progress, so it may need some tweaking before it may be considered reliable.