Re: Re: Instal failiures on a Macintosh LC475
Stephen R Marenka wrote:
Did you confirm that you don't have one of the problematic 68LC040s? I
had to swap mine out before the system was stable for any length of
time.
And we have a winner. The LC 475 is doing a memory swap and recording
the contents of a broken FPU/CPU to swap/ramdisk(the m68LC040) and when
the data comes back its rubbish.
You cannot run a stable Linux distro on any of the problem chips. What
happened with my Quadra 605 (A rebadged LC475 or the other way around)
was the same, it would boot, install and then some time later it would
hang, in a seemingly random way. Get a m68040 CPU and everything works
out fine.
Relevant section of FAQ http://mac.linux-m68k.org/docs/faq.php
Section IV: Hardware Requirements
"5. What about the 680LC40's?
This little chip can be quite a problem for the uninformed. If you have
one of these chips, you may have a defective one that does not support
any kind of FPU (floating-point) emulation. According to Motorola's
official errata, any chip with a mask revision less than 2E71M has the
bug. Specifically, revision 2E23G, used in the LC 475, has been
confirmed to be buggy. Running Linux on one of these machines is
possible, but probably not worth it. You'll need to recompile all of
your binaries not to use floating point (gcc's -m-soft-float option
works nicely) and you'll need to hack your kernel to cause it not to
try to save FPU register states while task-swapping. All in all, a
hellish task and probably not worth it. At one point, it was possible
to get a replacement from Apple and/or Motorola, but that was quite a
long time ago, and given Apple's present state of complete
disassociation from the 68k Macs, your best bet would be simply to
upgrade to a real 68040. Sorry."
--
Michael F. Tomkins C code
m.tomkins at student canberra edu au C code run
University of Canberra, Australia. Run code run
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