They do work in theory, but they have the same problem as the Linux ones. They freeze and flicker after seconds. The only OS I have found to work perfectly with them is NetBSD.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Void Linux for PowerPC
- Thread starter foxlet
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I’ve had no issues with graphics acceleration in OpenBSD for a Radeon 9200. Even video playback works nicely. However, I think netbsd removed Radeon DRI at least in the latest release? I was looking to benchmark the various BSDs and noticed the dri modules are gone for Radeon in the X11R7 folder and they were marked obsolete in whatever this is that google turned up
Is this due to X11 in general dropping support or could they be compiled if I opted to use a modular X11? Thanks.
I have no idea. And, if you have no issues with hardware acceleration, I would just stay with whatever OS you like. But this is really making me think.
With a Radeon 7500 or older, modern Xorg versions (since the kernel switched from UMS to KMS) don't work, at all. When you start X, all you get is two or three seconds of a clear image, and then an endless flickering that freezes your machine and does not even let you change to another tty until you hard reboot. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you can see the screen spitting out some errors. This continues until you disable hardware acceleration in a xorg .conf file. Then it works okay, but it's so slow that it's unusable. Even dragging an xterm window will be laggy. This happens under Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but not under NetBSD.
Under NetBSD, X just works. You start X, and everything is fine. Dragging windows or scrolling does not produce any noticeable lag, and you cannot appreciate any spike in CPU activity while dragging a window. This makes me think that at least 2D acceleration works. glxgears only gives a score of 20 fps. Debian Wheezy, running the UMS drivers, gave ~350.
I didn't know what made NetBSD's implementation of X different from these OSes. But now I know. Maybe they have identified DRI as the problematic component that makes this driver freeze. This makes me think if a Linux kernel compiled without DRI support would work. I will certainly try to look this up.
Currently compiling the Radeon driver to see if I can get DRI support back in NetBSD 9...
(excuse the quality my camera lens is literally cracked, I’m not quite sure how it gets any image)
Have you gotten acceleration to work at all on NBSD 9? Your FPS on glxgears should be way higher, I don’t think it’s actually accelerated. What is your vendor in glxinfo? That score is similar to my non accelerated X.
On NetBSD 9, X works, but through a software render. Running mpv media player crashes the whole thing, while openbsd will work with acceleration or without (although slowly without).
It seems there is no DRI support in NetBSD for Radeon according to relevant log files, although I’m trying to compile the DRI files.
I can't be 100% sure that I'm getting any kind of acceleration, since I have just wiped my NetBSD installation. But I can notice a very clear difference between it and Linux.
On NetBSD 9 with fluxbox, as said before, everything just works. I can drag an xterm window without any kind of lag, and the CPU is never above 20% when doing it. glxgears gives ~25 FPS.
On Void Linux, also with fluxbox, in order to be able to run Xorg, I have to add:
Code:
Option "Accel" "false"So there's something very weird going on underneath the hood on Linux/OpenBSD. I just don't know what.
Okay, so it’s confirmed you do not have acceleration in NetBSD. Just because X starts does not mean acceleration has been enabled.
After quite a bit of research, I’ve concluded:
OpenBSD has removed Mach64 drm in 2010. Radeon drm is still supported and works to get great acceleration in even the latest OpenBSD.
NetBSD removed Radeon drm (and probably Mach64 as well) at least in the 9.0 release. Radeon drm probably is available in any previous release.
Conclusion: latest OpenBSD supports Radeon 9200, latest NetBSD does not. OpenBSD removed Mach64 support about a decade ago (that’s what’s in my clamshell).
By the way, I actually dug through commits to figure out Mach64
Remove the drm drivers that are not enabled (and have never been so). · lattera/openbsd@db18f75
For now they are unmaintained, and work on kernel modesetting has very large inferface changes needing to be made. Also, when the radeon driver has been converted over, we will no longer support X ...
github.com
So Void supports Mach64 drm? That’s quite unexpected.
What do you think makes NetBSD's performance so good, then? On Linux you can't even drag a window without the CPU getting to 100% in htop without acceleration. On NetBSD the CPU usage barely goes up. What makes it run so well?
Pro tip, run:
Code:
glxinfo | grep "vendor"If you do not see your gpu manufacturer you do not have hardware acceleration.
I don't know. The Radeon 7500 needs Radeon drm. This is an iBook G3 Dual USB, BTW.
Or on void/ubuntu-remix run inxi -G
[void@powerbook ~]$ inxi -G
Graphics:
Device-1: AMD RV350/M10 / RV360/M11 [Mobility Radeon 9600 / 9700] driver: radeon
v: kernel
Display: server: X.Org 1.20.8 driver: ati,radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting
resolution: 1280x854~60Hz
OpenGL: renderer: ATI RV350 v: 2.1 Mesa 20.0.6
[void@powerbook ~]$ inxi -G
Graphics:
Device-1: AMD RV350/M10 / RV360/M11 [Mobility Radeon 9600 / 9700] driver: radeon
v: kernel
Display: server: X.Org 1.20.8 driver: ati,radeon unloaded: fbdev,modesetting
resolution: 1280x854~60Hz
OpenGL: renderer: ATI RV350 v: 2.1 Mesa 20.0.6
Not sure, your just using a software renderer either way so I assume it’s more efficient then the Linux one? Compared to any BSD Linux is quite bloated, and an obscure architecture doesn’t help performance. Never been a Linux guy, but that performance is unacceptable. X is not heavy, it runs perfect on an 300MHZ G3 using the software renderer in OpenBSD.
[automerge]1589677906[/automerge]
Nice OpenGL 2.1 capable card. That would help video player performance immensely.
[automerge]1589678063[/automerge]
Oh my mistake, you don’t have a Mach64 card.
We now have packaging templates for b43 wifi firmware, so it should be easier to get wireless working on powerbooks; updated instructions in https://docs.voidlinux-ppc.org/post-installation/index.html#wireless-networking
The firmware is still not redistributable, so nothing I can do about providing binary packages, but you can build your own binary packages of the firmware with xbps-src and install them afterwards.
While at it, two versions of the firmware are now provided, which solves the mystery of why the 6.x firmware would have poor performance (or just not work at all) on some powerbooks (e.g. my late 2005). Using the 5.x firmware works and gets adequate performance:
Anyway, as for the graphics stuff, 9200 is a fairly new card so it'll just work with the default KMS drivers and is not relevant to the previous conversation, which was about the xorg UMS driver, which indeed doesn't work with modern xorg.
As for mach64 and r128, we don't have 3D accel, as that would require packaging DRI drivers from Mesa 7.x, but the xorg driver (and 2D acceleration) should work for both. They use the legacy DRM infrastructure, so DRM is only used together with Mesa and doesn't deal with display, which is taken care of by the framebuffer driver. They don't do KMS at all.
But the Radeon 7xxx series are newer than r128/mach64. I don't have any hardware with that. I don't have hardware with mach64/r128 either, but it should work.
@wicknix it's not the VRAM on its own that makes the difference, it's that radeon 9200 and radeon 9700 are entirely different cores (the former is an opengl 1.3 card without unified shaders, the latter is a much more modern opengl 2.1 chip)
having shaders and stuff helps immensely with compositors, modern video players and so on which don't have fast fixed function paths anymore
The firmware is still not redistributable, so nothing I can do about providing binary packages, but you can build your own binary packages of the firmware with xbps-src and install them afterwards.
While at it, two versions of the firmware are now provided, which solves the mystery of why the 6.x firmware would have poor performance (or just not work at all) on some powerbooks (e.g. my late 2005). Using the 5.x firmware works and gets adequate performance:
Anyway, as for the graphics stuff, 9200 is a fairly new card so it'll just work with the default KMS drivers and is not relevant to the previous conversation, which was about the xorg UMS driver, which indeed doesn't work with modern xorg.
As for mach64 and r128, we don't have 3D accel, as that would require packaging DRI drivers from Mesa 7.x, but the xorg driver (and 2D acceleration) should work for both. They use the legacy DRM infrastructure, so DRM is only used together with Mesa and doesn't deal with display, which is taken care of by the framebuffer driver. They don't do KMS at all.
But the Radeon 7xxx series are newer than r128/mach64. I don't have any hardware with that. I don't have hardware with mach64/r128 either, but it should work.
@wicknix it's not the VRAM on its own that makes the difference, it's that radeon 9200 and radeon 9700 are entirely different cores (the former is an opengl 1.3 card without unified shaders, the latter is a much more modern opengl 2.1 chip)
having shaders and stuff helps immensely with compositors, modern video players and so on which don't have fast fixed function paths anymore
Last edited:
Do you know what is the reason(s) why they don't work? When I tried to build them, they complained about the lack of XAA support. Would it be just a process of patching Xorg to add XAA support again, or are there other incompatibilities?
Hi,
all updates are working! Thank you!
I installed "qutebrowser " as a smaller browser, but the app does not start. Isn't there any other browser (ppc64) than Firefox?
And the problem with Ardour6 persist; it does not appear in the appmenue, there is no icon and i have to start it from the terminal....what am i doing wrong?
all updates are working! Thank you!
I installed "qutebrowser " as a smaller browser, but the app does not start. Isn't there any other browser (ppc64) than Firefox?
And the problem with Ardour6 persist; it does not appear in the appmenue, there is no icon and i have to start it from the terminal....what am i doing wrong?
Hi folks, first post! I have several PPC Macs and am just beginning with VoidPPC. Previously I've used Gentoo and Ubuntu but I prefer VoidPPC at this point.
I have a couple of questions, if you'll humor me.
First, ArcticFox runs if I take the .deb 32 bit build, unarchive it, and manually run the files inside. Is there no way to have an xbps build of it that installs like any other web browser? I'm happy to help with this if someone points me in the right direction to get started. I also have a 64 bit G5 and can duplicate the work there so that we have 32 and 64 bit builds, I'm just not sure where to begin.
Second, when using yaboot I was able to boot OSX and MorphOS as well. How can I configure this in grub2? Is it possible?
Third, my monitor has phantom dimming problems. It'll occasionally just dim itself to complete blackness and I'm required to use the pbbuttonsd enabled function row keys to bring the screen brightness back up. This has also happened in Ubuntu previously. Any ideas why this would be happening?
Thanks! Happy to be here
I have a couple of questions, if you'll humor me.
First, ArcticFox runs if I take the .deb 32 bit build, unarchive it, and manually run the files inside. Is there no way to have an xbps build of it that installs like any other web browser? I'm happy to help with this if someone points me in the right direction to get started. I also have a 64 bit G5 and can duplicate the work there so that we have 32 and 64 bit builds, I'm just not sure where to begin.
Second, when using yaboot I was able to boot OSX and MorphOS as well. How can I configure this in grub2? Is it possible?
Third, my monitor has phantom dimming problems. It'll occasionally just dim itself to complete blackness and I'm required to use the pbbuttonsd enabled function row keys to bring the screen brightness back up. This has also happened in Ubuntu previously. Any ideas why this would be happening?
Thanks! Happy to be here
To install arcticfox on void 32bit (glibc version) all you need to do is install dpkg from voids repository. Then just "sudo dpkg -i /path/to/arcticfox.deb" to install it. This will create a menu entry with icon, and install it to its proper location.
Cheers
Cheers
@wicknix splendid, thanks. I’ll give that a whirl shortly.
Edit - worked a treat. Thanks!
2nd Edit - would still love to figure out how to get grub to boot osx/morphos - I prefer using a KVM switch to share keyboard/mouse/screen among all my computers and it doesn't seem to be recognized in time to get to the early boot screen on a mac.
Edit - worked a treat. Thanks!
2nd Edit - would still love to figure out how to get grub to boot osx/morphos - I prefer using a KVM switch to share keyboard/mouse/screen among all my computers and it doesn't seem to be recognized in time to get to the early boot screen on a mac.
Last edited:
Hi all,
Thanks foxlet, wicknix, q66_, and everyone else working on Linux for PowerPC. I have Void Linux running on a PowerBook G4 and an iMac G4. It works great. I am also multi-booting the PowerBook into Debian and Adelie via GRUB2 using btrfs subvolumes.
ArcticFox, SpiderWeb and InterWeb are working great too, in Debian and Void (glibc). For SpiderWeb and InterWeb, I symlinked my system's libffi.so.7 to libffi.so.6 to get it to run.
The Void Live CDs are nice. In the XFCE one, Epiphany works, which is more than I've got in my own installations.
I found that on the iMac (PowerMac 6,1), the internal audio card was not getting detected, except in the Live CD's Linux 4.4.218_1 option (but not when using that kernel in the local install). Running `modprobe snd_powermac` (and putting that in `/etc/rc.local`) fixed that.
Graphics acceleration with Nouveau is working, although there are some glitches. I got 30FPS in armagetronad.
I don't know how to do it with grub2, if it can be done. But if the machine can boot them, it should be possible to make a CHRP script to do it. yaboot uses a CHRP script "ofboot.b" as a first-stage bootstrap script. The yaboot package includes a program `mkofboot` that generates the `ofboot.b` script. The script gives you a prompt on boot to choose linux, macosx, macos, cdrom, etc. I think you could take one of those ofboot scripts and adapt it to give you the option to boot into Linux (via GRUB2) or the other OSs. From yaboot's ofboot.b, replace "\\yaboot" in the script with the path to the grub executable. If you are copying the script from another computer or disk, make sure that the device/partition paths are correct (See the Void Linux for PPC documentation for how to find device paths in OpenFirmware).
GRUB2 also includes a ofboot.b script which just boots grub directly, so you could try modifying or replacing that. (But make sure you have some way of fixing it if you break it). Also, if you replace or modify ofboot.b, make sure it still has the `tbxi` attribute and its directory is blessed, to make it bootable. (See Gentoo Wiki for an example of setting up a OF bootstrap filesystem, including how to use hcopy and hattrib to operate on an ofboot.b boot script.)
Thanks foxlet, wicknix, q66_, and everyone else working on Linux for PowerPC. I have Void Linux running on a PowerBook G4 and an iMac G4. It works great. I am also multi-booting the PowerBook into Debian and Adelie via GRUB2 using btrfs subvolumes.
ArcticFox, SpiderWeb and InterWeb are working great too, in Debian and Void (glibc). For SpiderWeb and InterWeb, I symlinked my system's libffi.so.7 to libffi.so.6 to get it to run.
The Void Live CDs are nice. In the XFCE one, Epiphany works, which is more than I've got in my own installations.
I found that on the iMac (PowerMac 6,1), the internal audio card was not getting detected, except in the Live CD's Linux 4.4.218_1 option (but not when using that kernel in the local install). Running `modprobe snd_powermac` (and putting that in `/etc/rc.local`) fixed that.
Graphics acceleration with Nouveau is working, although there are some glitches. I got 30FPS in armagetronad.
I don't know how to do it with grub2, if it can be done. But if the machine can boot them, it should be possible to make a CHRP script to do it. yaboot uses a CHRP script "ofboot.b" as a first-stage bootstrap script. The yaboot package includes a program `mkofboot` that generates the `ofboot.b` script. The script gives you a prompt on boot to choose linux, macosx, macos, cdrom, etc. I think you could take one of those ofboot scripts and adapt it to give you the option to boot into Linux (via GRUB2) or the other OSs. From yaboot's ofboot.b, replace "\\yaboot" in the script with the path to the grub executable. If you are copying the script from another computer or disk, make sure that the device/partition paths are correct (See the Void Linux for PPC documentation for how to find device paths in OpenFirmware).
GRUB2 also includes a ofboot.b script which just boots grub directly, so you could try modifying or replacing that. (But make sure you have some way of fixing it if you break it). Also, if you replace or modify ofboot.b, make sure it still has the `tbxi` attribute and its directory is blessed, to make it bootable. (See Gentoo Wiki for an example of setting up a OF bootstrap filesystem, including how to use hcopy and hattrib to operate on an ofboot.b boot script.)
Thanks for your reply. I think the critical functionality missing in grub is apparently the ability to chainload other BootX (of ofboot.b) files. Sad Doesn't look like this is going to work for me.
Doesn't look like this is going to work for me.
Maybe I should rethink this a bit. I know yaboot is touted as old dead software, and I tend to agree, but its ability to launch OSX/MorphOS make it very interesting to me. I have grub2 installed already; how would I go about installing yaboot as well? I am fairly certain with yaboot I can launch everything I need.