Re: Getting the ol' Macintosh LC475 modernized
On Sun, 18 Aug 2013, Scott Holder wrote:
> So I finally dug the old LC 475 (aka Performa 475, aka Quadra 605) out
> of the closet and got it booting its old Linux again. I've upgraded it
> with a full 33mhz 68040 and overclocked it to 33mhz, so the 68LC040
> issues should be gone. This is a circa 2002 setup with a nice old 2.2
> kernel. Even has X running with icewm. Fun, but I'd rather get it
> modernized.
>
> I decided to first just try booting the kernel at
> http://people.debian.org/~tg/f/m68k/20121227/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-mac just to make
> sure it did something interesting - I don't expect it to work with the old
> root, but I figured I'd start with at least that much.
If you boot an old woody/sarge root, you will have ADB keymap problems and
the keyboard won't be usable (though the serial console could avoid that
issue).
>
> However, I'm running into the hang at the "ABCDEFGHIJK" point. I get the
> black and white penguin with some hardware info and it hangs at that
> point.
Looks like the infamous unexpected serial interrupt that affects older
kernels. There is a workaround for the issue. But you'd do better to use a
kernel which has the serial port initialisation fix because that way you
get a reliable early console (Linux 3.10, 3.9.y or 3.4.y).
Without an early console, you don't get any kernel messages until the
framebuffer console comes up. In this case, the crash happens before the
framebuffer driver starts.
> I see on the Debian wiki there's no feedback yet for Macintosh on this
> kernel, so I guess this is it. I don't currently have any
> cross-compiling setup on my x64 Linux boxes, but I'd not be against
> getting it going if it'd be helpful.
If you know how, it's definitely worth cross-compiling a custom kernel.
You can cut out a lot of the excess baggage in the debian kernel. I always
recommend this because RAM is scarce.
You can also build-in the important kernel functionality, which means you
can then easily boot into any initrd, cd-rom installer or other filesystem
(ide/scsi/ataoe/nfs etc) that you happen to have handy (notwithstanding
issues with ancient userland). That sort of thing is painful when any of
the important kernel stuff modularized.
One day I will update the cross-build instructions and upload mac kernel
binaries to the sourceforge project page. Until then, I'm happy to build a
kernel for you to test.
> I don't have a lot of coding experience (especially kernel level) but
> I'm certainly happy to do what I can to keep this working on real
> hardware. I wonder how long it'd take to compile a Stage 1 Gentoo
> install on this thing...
Roughly forever unless you use distcc and a cross-compiler. Even then, the
rest of the build will still take days (configure, link, etc).
Finn
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