[rescue] IBM IntelliStation POWER5 9111-285

[Charles Monett]

On 1/30/2012 3:08 AM, Mark Benson wrote:
> On 30 Jan 2012, at 07:53, Charles Monett wrote:
>
>> That's just a PCI ID change in the kernel source(I've run nearly the
>> whole set of those under the same code - 4500, 6500, 6000) if I'm not
>> mistaken.   Those boards aren't too terribly different from each other
>> as far as Linux will see them.  About the only other Linux-side issue
>> might be color flipping in X11 - if you have a 64bit userland.
> The kernel patch that the Crux PPC team rolled is very simple if you
> know your way around the PPC Kernel code, but no-one submitted it to the
> code tree for the official PPC kernel development so it's never been
> rolled into the main kernel.
>
> The colour flipping occurs in X11 if you don't patch the kernel (I assume
> therefore there's a fix for the framebuffers that are supported in the
> ppc64 kernel as you have to use fbdev drivers anyway).
>
> Given a serial console and a few hours you could probably patch Debian,
> or even better roll a patch for Debian and place it in their source tree
> for Wheezy for testing, and solve the issue. I just don't know how, I'm not
> a kernel developer ^_^
I'm not a kernel developer either, but I ended up having one pick around 
my 44P to write the initial GXT4x00P/6x00P code that exists(existed?) 
since 2.6.18/2.6.19.

Good to see that it was fixed kernel-side.  Even with a well-loaded 
(~16GB, 4x375) POWER3-II box, repeatedly backporting X11 bits is a PITA.

>> Just how bad has it gotten for Linux on POWER?   I thought it atrophied
>> a bit, but I could be mistaken.
> It's actually passable. Debian is still current on PPC as is Crux. Fedora
> has a current (F16) development version but I haven't tried it as yet.
> OpenSUSE
> is stuck at 11.1. SUSE and RedHat do current paid versions supported by IBM.
>
> I'm kinda hacked off CentOS dropped PPC a couple of years back. RHEL runs on
> PPC
> so it's kind of a no-brainer to roll CentOS for it, I guess they got fed up
> of
> all the Mac users who didn't like the colour of the carpet ;)
>
OpenSuSE was about the best way to strap a 44P/43P-150 CHRP 
"brokenfirmware" box for having a proper yaboot.  I keep their yaboot 
backed up just for working consistently across POWER boxes.

As for Crux and Debian, that sounds promising - especially if there 
aren't issues with using more than >2gb memory at a time ;).