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OS X Tiger on a 603/604 CPU

LightBulbFun

LightBulbFun

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Nov 17, 2013
2,908
3,205
London UK
its well known by now that most PCI OWR Macs can Run OS X with the help of xpostfacto but with out a CPU upgrade to a G3 or higher it was said the highest OS you could run on its stock 604 or 603 CPU was OS X 10.2.8 well I was researching this and I came across this http://www.jump-ing.com/?en/Projects/Tiger_on_7600 and I was surprised you could run OS X 10.4 on a 604/603 and I wanted to test this well I dont own a Mac with a 604/603 CPU But what I can do is emulate one with pearpc (QEMUs 60x emulation seems to be broken) So I set up 10.4 with the 604/603 kernel and after some issues with permissions I got it to boot... and this was very cool But the problem still stood that the highest kernel he provides on that webpage is for 10.4.3 and I was thinking what about 10.4.11? so I went around figuring out how to compile and patch the kernel and well after ALOT of failures and problems (in the end I got it to compile on my Dual 2Ghz G5) I got the 10.4.11 Kernel to compile! and it worked on my 604 emulated mac! while I don't own a 604/603 Mac I know many of you here do so I will attach the Kernel I made (very pleased with this first time iv compiled a OS X kernel too) here for you guys to try out... (I wont go into details on how to get it installed in this post) (I also attached some photos on of the stock kernel running on a G3 and a uname -a output you can see the date is 2007 and ill put a pic of my kernel running with its 2015 build date on a 604e)
Screen Shot 2015-08-17 at 14.24.43.png Screen Shot 2015-08-17 at 14.40.52.png
 

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  • mach_kernel.zip
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Congrats! I really wish I had a use for this because this seems really awesome. Someone install on a beige-y, quick!
 
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I am looking forward to it heh... (I recommend setting up a tiger install on a HDD on a supported machine first to get everything installed (Like xpostfacto and my kernel) then move it to the Beige machine and booting from it
 
I probably won't get to tackle it until this weekend, but I'm at least prepping a Tiger install at the moment.

My Dual 1.42 has been sitting idle since I bought it, so this gave me a good chance to play with it :) . I'm going to install xpostfacto and the modified kernel tonight hopefully, then it will be ready for me to the IDE card and drive in my 9600 this weekend

The fun thing to test will be multiprocessor support on the 9600 :)

(will the modified kernel still boot on a G4?)
 
The modified kernel will still boot on all supported Macs. Oddly enough, I looked at Leopard's kernel. It has identifiers in if for the 750 branch processors all the way up through to the 970 branch. In theory that patch, all it really does is comment out an unsupported CPU check, would work on a Leopard kernel. Maybe even allow Leopard to boot on a G3 or 603/604. A good test would be to patch the Leopard 10.5.8 kernel, test it on a G4 upgraded B&W G3, then swap in the stock G3 CPU and see how far it'll boot. Leopard booting to the desktop on a 603, that'd make Steve spin in his grave (may he rest well).
 
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I'll play with the B&W...

A 603 would be fun, but I think the HDD in my only 603-based system is about 1/4 the size of the Leopard install disk. 2.5" SCSI drives are pretty much unobtainable anyway in any capacity. Since I think the 5300 series can boot from the PCMCIA slot, I guess I could always stick a 32gb CF card in there and try.

The other alternative would be to pick up a Performa, but I'd rather not do that for the dignity of my collection :)
 
We have successful kernel insertion-now I just need to transplant the drive into a 604e Mac. I may try tomorrow evening-I'll probably either put the 604 back in my 8600 or try my 7350.

Picture 1.png
 
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bunnspecial said:
Since I think the 5300 series can boot from the PCMCIA slot, I guess I could always stick a 32gb CF card in there and try.

The other alternative would be to pick up a Performa, but I'd rather not do that for the dignity of my collection :)
Click to expand...

Your biggest problem in running Tiger, let alone Leopard on a 5300 series would be the lack of RAM needed to boot unless you could somehow hack the memory requirements.
 
weckart said:
Your biggest problem in running Tiger, let alone Leopard on a 5300 series would be the lack of RAM needed to boot unless you could somehow hack the memory requirements.
Click to expand...

I forgot about that. Forget hacking the requirements-with 16mb of RAM, I haven't really been too inclined to upgrade past System 7.5(what was installed when I got it). OS 8 is a complete no-go for me on principle, and I think 8.5 would be a pig with that little RAM.
 
I think the only pre-G3 PB option would be the 3400 maxed out and even then you would not be able to run much in the way of applications unless you like thrashing the hard drive for virtual memory. The PB1400 even came with a G3 upgrade but could only handle a max of 64MB of RAM. That made sense.
 
Alright, here's my current report.

As I mentioned above, I prepped a Tiger install on a clean disk. This was done on a dual 1.42 FW800 MDD.

1. Booted off the 10.4.3 install DVD

2. Used Disk Utility to format the selected 40gb IDE drive into 1 partition/APM(since I'm using a PCI IDE card, it should be free of the infamous 8gb cap on beige G3s)

3. Installed Tiger on that drive

4. Ran all software updates to bring it up to the most current version available

5. Downloaded and ran Xpostfacto 4

6. Downloaded lightbulbfun's modified kernel

7. Used SUM to replace the installed kernel with the modified one

8. Rebooted in the MDD to confirm that the Tiger install was still good and that the modified kernel had installed(see screencap above).

I then pulled out my 8600 along with a few additional parts: the original 604E/200 processor card, a Radeon 9200(Mac edition) and an Acard PCI IDE card(the exact same P/N Intell tells me he used in his 8600 for the Leopard install).

I put all this into the 8600, then booted into OS 9.1. The previously-prepared IDE Tiger install mounted to the desktop. "Startup Disk" in 9.1 recognized it as a bootable volume although-interesting-it just called it "OS X" and didn't give the version number as OS 9 typically does in this menu(or perhaps it never does in 9.1-I really have next to no experience with 9.1, although a fair bit with 9.2.2).

I selected this volume and hit "restart."

Restarting gave me the floppy with the question mark for about a second before proceeding to boot into 9.1. Unplugging the SCSI HDD would leave me at the blinking question floppy.

Tomorrow(time permitting) I may try an OS 9 install on an IDE disk just to confirm that the Acard is working correctly. Alternatively, it might be time to break into my stash of 80 pin SCSI drives and clone the Tiger install over to that.

I'll also add that I tried re-installing the G4 card in the 8600, and it also would not boot into Tiger.
 
Just a top tip you should use xpostfacto in OS9 as your boot selector... I find the stock OS9 boot selector at least on my G3 beige running OS X 10.4 on one partition can be quite pokey... (I don't think i ever had it working it just booted back into OS9 all the time so i used xpostfacto to boot into 10.4)
 
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LBF has it right. You have to use XPF to boot unsupported OSX installations and eschew StartupDisk even if it seems to recognise the OSX installation as bootable otherwise the required NVRAM strings don't get passed over.
 
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Here's another interesting point-although this probably won't be a surprise to Intell.

The Acard ATA card I'm using actually registers in System Profiler as a Parallel SCSI card. The HDD connected to it shows up in the SCSI tree under System Profiler.
 
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so Tiger (with my patched kernel) will run on a beige PCI mac with its stock 604 CPU man thats bloody awesome :D Im wondering now would it work on a 601 CPU? its said OS X cant run at all on a 601 (according to xpostfacto). to run OS X on a beige machine it needs to have open firmware so the PowerBook 5300 is out of the game for example. the 2 machines I know of with a 601 CPU and open firmware is the 7200 and the 7500. regarding it showing up as 350Mhz I see it reports your bus speed as 100Mhz so that might have something to do with it (also did geek bench run? geekbench 2.2.0 is the last one for tiger)
 
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LightBulbFun said:
sregarding it showing up as 350Mhz I see it reports your bus speed as 100Mhz so that might have something to do with it (also did geek bench run? geekbench 2.2.0 is the last one for tiger)
Click to expand...

Interesting! Are you saying that the reported CPU/bus speed is incorrect? Are the 60x processors basically the same as G3 processors?
 
flyrod said:
Interesting! Are you saying that the reported CPU/bus speed is incorrect? Are the 60x processors basically the same as G3 processors?
Click to expand...

indeed it looks like its not reporting it correctly... its odd since I have seen other beige PCI macs running OS X (with G3/4 upgrades) that report the bus speed correctly along with the CPU speed. (bus speed on the 8600 is 40-50Mhz IRC) the 750 G3 CPU was derived from the 603 CPU (skipping the 604) one of the Major features of the G3 was its fast backside L2 cache... a G3 750 with out that is about as fast as a 603 or so of equivalent speed
 
flyrod said:
Interesting! Are you saying that the reported CPU/bus speed is incorrect? Are the 60x processors basically the same as G3 processors?
Click to expand...

The G3 was very heavily based on the 603/603e.

Some of us have speculated that a higher clocked 604e would likely have outperformed a G3. I forget what the 604 series topped out at, but I think it was 300mhz. The first few generations of G3 were 233 and 266mhz, but most of the later ones(post Steve Jobs) were 300mhz or faster.
 
bunnspecial said:
The G3 was very heavily based on the 603/603e.

Some of us have speculated that a higher clocked 604e would likely have outperformed a G3. I forget what the 604 series topped out at, but I think it was 300mhz. The first few generations of G3 were 233 and 266mhz, but most of the later ones(post Steve Jobs) were 300mhz or faster.
Click to expand...
the 604 series topped out on apple machines at 350Mhz (there was briefly a 350Mhz 9600 but it was not sold for very long) the fastest 604 topped out at 400Mhz but apple did not use this chip in any of there machines
 
128keaton said:
Bunn, how bad is it? Does general useage just make it die?
Click to expand...

About all I did was browse the web for a few minutes. It actually handled that well, but it was slow. It had issues with rendering this forum correctly, but then I was using a very outdated version of Safari(I never use Safari in Tiger otherwise, so am not sure how it compares). Page loads were slow, but again I'm not sure if I can attribute that to the 10baseT ethernet or the sluggishness of the system. When I finally get around to installing Leopard, I'm going to have to make a tough decision about whether I want USB/FW or 10/100 ethernet, as I only have one expansion slot left to play with. I'm inclined to think internet sharing with another computer over FW would be the way to go.

The only "off the shelf" way I know to get a modern browser would be to run Classilla in classic mode, although I'm not sure how well the computer would handle the resource hit of that.

The GUI was also a bit sluggish. Apparently there is a way to enable QE on the PCI 9200 I was using, which I think would perk things up a lot.

Again, I'm going to try this in the 9600/200MP this weekend and see how it does with two processors. We all know that dual G4 or G5 processors give a huge speed boost under Tiger(and Leopard) since the OS is smart enough to spread tasks across the available cores. I'll be interested to see how it does with a 604.

And, if I could get my 7200 to actually boot, I'd try it on that. I have a feeling that a 75mhz 601 would be miserable. I'm also not sure how much RAM is in it, so don't know how it would handle Tiger. I tried to get the computer going for lightbulbfun the other day, as I wanted to use the oldest Apple computer I possibly could with my 23" aluminum Cinema. I did get a Happy Mac(on the ACD, no less), but can't get the computer past there even with on-board video.
 
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I put the G4 back in the 8600. To be fair, this is my first experience with running OS X on this particular computer/processor combo, but I actually found it less stable than running with the 604e. In particular, TFF, Activity Monitor, and Safari all crashed on me before the system KPed. I may try replacing the original kernel and try again, but before I do that I want to run this Tiger install on the 9600.

For the time being, here are some more screen shots. System Profiler more or less reported the G4 correctly, although it still called it a 60?(a common thing I see with aftermarket CPUs) and I don't think it saw the L3 that the processor has(and is seen in OS 9). It did correctly report the 50mhz FSB.

I'm also attaching a screen cap of the SCSI device tree to show the ATA card.

I also think that Activity Monitor is definitely telling me I need more RAM, although I've been hesitant to drop $100 at OWC for 1gb of RAM.

Picture 6.png
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Picture 8.png
Picture 9.png
Picture 5.png
 
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