PowerMac 7500 with MAXpowrMP booting 2.4.20 in MP mode - some trouble
Hey, finally got myself another PowerPC to play with - it's an old
PowerMac 7500 with a dual-604e processor card. It works pretty well -
I've succeeded in getting a working Debian install on it - but I've got
a few issues.
First, I've discovered that it doesn't need MacOS, and that quik will
work for multiprocessor booting. Well, most of the time - as long as I
cold boot the machine. (It's a PowerMac 7500 with 176 MB of RAM and a
MAXpowr MP processor board from NewerTech - I got it for free from a
coworker.) If I boot a uniprocessor kernel, it always boots fine; if I
boot an SMP kernel, it'll come up right, as long as I boot the system
cold. If I reboot the system, on the next boot when one of the init
scripts tries to get the time from the CUDA RTC, it hangs. Sometimes it
hangs with the message 'cuda: state=awaiting_reply, status=[something]'.
I can't remember what, and it only gets that message out occasionally
before seizing the machine up hard - even Ctrl-Cmd-Power won't reboot
it, only the power button will have an effect.
Second, this system has a Voodoo3 PCI with a Mac OF ROM on it.
Unfortunately, if I don't use BootX to boot Linux, the card doesn't get
sufficiently initialized, and so using the tdfxfb driver doesn't work at
all - the video is too screwed up to read. (It's trying - just not
succeeding.) OFFB does work, but it's kinda sluggish.
Third, the nvramrc is fairly large, apparently taking up most of the
space in the NVRAM, so setting the 'boot-file' parameter for quik to
autoboot doesn't work - OF says "string too long", nvsetenv in Linux
just segfaults. Any alternate possibilities for me? It seems to mostly
ignore what I've told it in quik.conf, other than when installing the
bootblock.
--
Derrik Pates
dpates@dsdk12.net
dpates@voxel.net
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