Beyond Inteldome

Several weeks ago, I bought my first new desktop computer since I cobbled one together out of parts back in 2000. Since it was the first new one in so long and I can have nice things, I went with the Quad G5. It took a little while to deal with the order placement, paying, and shipping but I finally got it last week.

Of course, being the kind of person I am, I decided I had to run Fedora on it. After all, that’s the thing I work on and with all the other computers around here being Linux, I didn’t want to have to deal with those multiplatform issues. Naturally, installing Linux on brand new Mac hardware is not easy.

My first problem was that the bootloader (yaboot) didn’t work at all. Luckily, I happen to work with one of the upstream yaboot guys, so this wasn’t too bad of a problem. The symptoms were that with our yaboot installed onto a USB key, the bootloader would crap back out to firmware immediately after loading the kernel, and with no debugging printing enabled. After a couple days of messing around, we narrowed the problem down to two firmware calls that cleared the screen. Apparently, something in our yaboot package was corrupting the memory that this call was using. Hence, back to firmware.

We tried various ways to get around that problem but eventually I got bored of not using my shiny new machine and built a new USB key image to try out at home with the screen clearing calls removed. Sure, it’s ugly now, but at least it boots. Well, on to the next problem - anaconda doesn’t recognize the USB keyboard and mouse. That makes it pretty hard to install, since those are the only input devices available. I agonized over that a couple days, checking out things module loading code in our images and looking at lspci output and all that. Eventually, I got the smart idea to try the USB key on the dual G5 at work. And what do you know, that exhibited the same behavior.

So it appears that booting Linux on a G5 from a USB key just nukes the input devices for later on. I don’t have any information on why this is just yet, but at least I figured out the problem. This was easily gotten around by just making a new boot CD with the special yaboot binary on it.

Finally after getting the install done, I can discover the runtime problems - the kernel likes to spew debugging warnings at me (already sent a patch to the PPC kernel guys for that) and there’s no sound. Unfortunately, that last one is a known problem.

Anyway, the new computer is really nice and running Linux on it hasn’t presented me with any real problems yet. It’s an excellent and fast machine. I’m sure that once sound is working, I can experience all the problems of no media software built for PPC Linux. But that’s okay, because I’m capable of building a package or two.