Re: Newbie/Novice Question
On 28 May, this message from Chris echoed through cyberspace:
> The Question:
> Can I somehow use a driver built for a Debian x86 PCI card and use that card in
> a Debian PPC (OldWorld PowerMac) machine?
You cannot use a binary i386 driver. Executables are very different
bentween i386 and powerpc; the're different processor architectures,
after all.
What you _can_ do, however, is use regular PC-style video cards in a
Mac, as long as:
- you have driver source code for the card that works on powerpc. There
are a few fundamental differences (big endian vs. little endian) the
driver author needs to be aware off. Among the cards that should work
are ATI cards of the Mach64 series and later, Matrox cards (I even
have OpenFirmware code for Matrox Millenium's somewhere...).
- you don't need to intercat with OpenFirmware (the equivalent of PC
BIOS on Macs) via the video card. Since the PC-style video card will
not have an OpenFirmware ROM, but rather a PC BIOS ROM, your video
card will remain dark until Linux loads the driver for it.
- the card's driver can initialize the video card from the ground up.
You need to try this; I know of at least one person on this list that
needed to use an i386 emulator in software to run the video card's
BIOS routines to initialize the card.
> Why: I scrounge up many old Video cards that are have MUCH better performance
> than the old 2mb and 4mb PCI video cards (and a world better than using built in
> video) that came in the Macs. I just want to give my projects a bit more power
> w/o having to spend much money. Plus we could then use standard SVGA monitors
> w/o needing a supply of adapters.
Keep in mind though that you will need some rather serious video card
(by old-time standards...) to beat the built-in video of some Macs.
Notably, my 7600's built-in video is overall comparable to the Matrox
Millenium I that I also tried in this box. The problem here might well
be bandwidth to the video RAM, and since the PCI bus of these early
machines isn't that fast either, you may be eating lots of PCI bandwidth
(not available for other things) when using a PCI video card. The
built-in video, on the other hand, has a separate PCI-like bus (which is
faster on top of that).
> We would also like to (cheaply) add used IDE disks to the macs w/ PCI IDE
> controller cards out of old Pentiums and 486 machines (EIDE and UDMA/33). At
> $75 per card for the Mac IDE controllers it's not cost effective when you're
> talking about adding old < 1.2 GB drives.
I have good experience with a Promise Ultra66. However, here again, it
will be a problem of missing OpenFirmware code in the IDE card's ROM.
All PC-style cards only have BIOS code in their ROMS, not OpenFirmware
code. This means that you can't boot off them in a Mac. So you would
need to keep a SCSI disk to boot the box, but could later use the IDE
disks. At a minimum, you'd need the /boot partition with the kernel on a
SCSI disk.
If yo send along the types of machines you're looking at, we may be able
to give more precise and targeted tips.
Cheers
Michel
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michel Lanners | " Read Philosophy. Study Art.
23, Rue Paul Henkes | Ask Questions. Make Mistakes.
L-1710 Luxembourg |
email mlan@cpu.lu |
http://www.cpu.lu/~mlan | Learn Always. "
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: