A follow-up to a previous negative review of the RaptorCS POWER9 Blackbird PC. After the original critical article gained attention on Hacker News, Raptor reached out, replaced a defective CPU and mainboard, and implemented systemic support improvements including a self-serve RMA system and better wiki documentation. The replacement hardware worked well, compiling the Linux kernel in 4m15s on 32 threads. The author details the extraordinary number of failures on the original board (broken BMC ethernet, serial boot loops, a bizarre petitboot bug) and plans to use the new machine as a ppc64le build slave for Sourcehut.
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