Re: Dualboot Mac OS X and NetBSD on Power Mac?

[Dennis Ferguson <dennis.c.ferguson%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 27 Apr 2010, at 13:10 , Chris Ross wrote:

> 
> On Apr 27, 2010, at 15:27, Michael wrote:
>> On Apr 27, 2010, at 2:58 PM, Chris Ross wrote:
>>> I have a quad-core Power Mac G5 that I'm thinking about pushing into a 
>>> server-class machine in the closet at some point over the next year.  But, 
>>> for now, it's still my primary desktop machine.  So, I have two main 
>>> questions:
>>> 
>>> 1) Does NetBSD/macppc run (well?) on this hardware?
>> 
>> No.
> 
> Okay.  Well, then that's clearly more important to address first.  :-)
> 
> What doesn't work well?  Does it work at all?

It worked at one point but the code seems to be bit-rotted; I had to
fix problems in two files just to get a G5 kernel to compile.  I managed to
get to an ofwboot prompt, but it kept complaining about an (unspecified)
I/O error trying to read the kernel off the HFS disk.  I left it at that
point; I'll next try to boot it diskless when I have some time to spend
on it.

> I'm not concerned about 64-bit support, as
> I only have 3 GB of memory and would be using this as a storage server if not 
> more than a compute server.  I saw something in mailing lists about the SATA 
> controller not being supported?  Is that the/a core issue?

I really want a 64 bit kernel for this machine; I have a small collection
of G5's and a project that gets significant benefit from 64 bit loads.  That,
however, requires a big block of time to work on.

A 32 bit kernel, however, seems like it shouldn't be that difficult.  This
did work at one point, the only problem is that point was about 5 years ago
and the rest of the kernel has moved on while that code has apparently sat
still.  It needs someone to work through its problems to revive it.

> Is there any work being done on getting this hardware [fully] supported in 
> the macppc NetBSD port?

I don't think anyone could be running this code at all (in a recent kernel)
since if they were I'd expect not to get compilation errors when trying
to build a -current kernel.  I don't know about missing hardware support
(I can't see any indication that the G5's disk controller is missing support,
for what that's worth), but its current problems are more fundamental than
that in any case.

Dennis Ferguson