32bit PowerPC support about archpower

[kth5]

First powerpc ISO:
https://archlinuxpower.org/iso/alpha/archpower-2020.10.04-powerpc.iso

• no ppc64 kernel so can only boot on 603 up to 74xx.
• needs manually adding the following to pacman.conf to get going

Architecture = powerpc
[base32]
Server = https://archlinuxpower.org/base-ppc32
[base]
Server = https://archlinuxpower.org/base

[kth5]

New ISO out with above pacman.conf issue fixed:
https://archlinuxpower.org/iso/alpha/archpower-2020.10.06-powerpc.iso

[crazycusti]

hey!

i would like to help for powerpc32, powerpc64 (BE) but my programming/porting skills is not so good. The last years i tried many ArchPPC builds, but with no success.

-> https://github.com/crazycusti/Arch-Linux-PPC

i had many PowerPC-devices.. G3, G4, G4 MDD, G5, PowerBooks, iBooks.. of course an xserve g5 too! So automated builds-devices or test-devices are available.

i never really work with docker, so i had no idea where start from. blind crosscompile would be a totally chaos, i tried so often.

[kth5]

That's cool news someone has interest still!

I'd personally refuse to actually build on those old-skool Apple computers. Firstly, they are wholly inefficient power consumption wise and secondly most of the time are actually unable to build certain packages with LTO enabled. Chromium, Python (3.x) etc come to mind where the maxed out RAM in a G4 based machine will not accommodate or the 32bit address space prohibit it from allocating enough on a G5. I'm reluctant to also provide ppc64 BE builds all things considered, at least not without full automation which I haven't had time for so far.

What would be cool though is regular testing on these. I only have a MacMini G4 1.25GHz with maxed out RAM at 1GiB here for instance.

What I've already got is available here:

[base32]
Server = https://archlinuxpower.org/base-ppc32/

I'm doing this on a PPC64 VM via libvirt on a Blackbird running Archpower ppc64le and KVM enabled btw.

DM me at [email protected] if you have any ideas on how to contribute already and have any insight on how you imagine your collaboration.

[crazycusti]

i will tried the images on friday.. on real macintosh hardware 💯

yesterday, i boot up successful the 10.04 iso on qemu!

[kth5]

Boots fine on Qemu but still not on my Mac Mini G4 where it halts with an illegal memory access and drops back to OF. Most likely a kernel .config issue.

[crazycusti]

yes, same on powerbook g4

https://dump.chrisnew.de/upload/data/public/IMG_20201008_184005.jpg

edit: oh, sehe gerade wir können ja beide deutsch.. macht es für mich einfacher :)

[kth5]

New ISO available:
https://archlinuxpower.org/iso/alpha/archpower-2020.10.17-powerpc.iso

Fixes:

• boots on PowerBook G4 Aluminium 15" & 17"
• boots on MacMini G4 1.25Ghz
• KVM (extremely slow network, seems limited to 1Mbps)

Problems:

• when booting from CD, most of the time the volume label isn't picked up so has to manually be mounted and shell exited twice via CTRL+D

mount /dev/sr0 /run/archiso/bootmnt
^D
^D

[kth5]

Notes:

Accellerated X.org working on PowerBook G4 17" Aluminium (Radeon 9600 Pro 64MB):

$ pacman -Sy linux # reinstall/update to 5.9.0-1 from mirror
$ pacman -S linux-firmware xf86-video-ati
$ cat /proc/cmdline
> video=offb video=radeonfb:off radeon.agpmode=-1 radeon.modeset=1
$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
> blacklist radeonfb

• xfce4 fully works as intended (several hours with heavy xfce4-terminal use)
• eduke32 starts but crashes at random times (could be another unrelated problem)
• all of the above assumes radeon based graphics, nvidia untested as no hardware available

[kth5]

How to use Grub for booting:

• create a bootstrap partition with at least 4MiB size (better 12MiB to be safe, default 800KiB is too small, even ATA diskspace is cheap)
  

• install as normal (assumed to /mnt)

$ pacstrap /mnt/ base linux grub hfsutils

• format bootstrap partition (/dev/sda2) from target (no hfsutils on iso yet)

$ arch-chroot /mnt
$$ hformat /dev/sda2
$ ^D

• mount bootstrap partition (assumed /dev/sda2) to /boot/grub on the target rootfs and configure/install

$ mkdir /mnt/boot/grub
$ mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot/grub
# bootstrap partition should always get mounted to /boot/grub so grub hooks may work properly
$ genfstab -U /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab
$ arch-chroot /mnt
$$ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
# this one will fail if bootstrap is too small (depends on Grub mods included with core.elf)
$$ grub-install 

This method will execute on KVM but will fail at setting the OF variable boot-device properly. No fix known at this time.

[kth5]

@crazycusti Das macht es fuer Dich einfacher, nur leider nicht fuer den Rest der Welt. ;)

[kth5]

X stable as can be with somewhat accelerated state:

Using Midori as a browser here (webkit2gtk based). It's slow, not very feature rich but does the trick for looking things up.

Have a Firefox 82.0 build ready for ppc but it segfaults. Debugging required and I seriously do not want to go the ArcticFox route.

All things considered, it turns out to become a quite usable system.

[kth5]

New ISO out for ppc/ppc64:

https://archlinuxpower.org/iso/alpha/archpower-2021.01.20.1-powerpc.iso

[kth5]

Since ISO is out and we've had successful installs on G5 and G4 hardware, I consider this done for the moment.