Re: NetBSD on Xserve G5

[vincent%labri.fr@localhost]

       Hi,

Paul Mather <paul%gromit.dlib.vt.edu@localhost> writes:

> If anyone has successfully installed NetBSD on an Xserve G5, or is
> currently using such a setup, I'd be grateful to hear whether you give
> it a thumbs up or thumbs down; if there are any caveats; and so on.
> Alternatively, if anyone knows of a better supported open source OS
> for the Xserve G5, I'd be glad to hear of persuasive suggestions.
> (I'd much rather stick with *BSD, though.)

It actually happens that my school was given three Xserve G5's (also
without video cards) and I tried installing netbsd on one of them. In
the current state of things, the kernel won't even compile due to minor
issues (I have simple patches for that). I was able to make it go to the
point where the MMU is enabled and it crashes exactly on this
instruction, so the page table must have something wrong but I didn't
have time to investigate yet.

> Finally, is NetBSD/macppc on the Xserve G5 a 32- or 64-bit system?

It is a 32 bit system. It uses the "bridge" mode of the PPC64, and
roughly the only thing "64bit" in the system is the page table. There
are pieces of code in the kernel for a true 64 bit mode but I didn't
try that.

Debian/ppc64 works (in 64 bit mode), and OpenBSD (also using bridge
mode, 32bit) hung when probing one hard disk controller, but I would
guess it's a simple matter of tweaking the kernel config file to exclude
the controllers in question (or fixing the cause of the hang, of
course).

Regards,
 Aymeric