Re: accelerator boards
On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, F. Heitkamp wrote:
Does Debian work with the accelerator boards for Macintosh computers?
Has anyone tested or had experience/problems with any of them?
It's not a matter of Debian working - it's whether the kernel supports
them or not.
For "newer macs" (i.e. anything with a built-in USB port), you should
be able to use G4 upgrades just fine. The company making the upgrade
card may have firmware updates for you to install, which may require
you to run from OS X, but after that, you should be able to use them
in linux without any problems.
If you're like me, and you have an older mac (machines that originally
came with 601/603(e)/604(e) CPUs), then it becomes more complicated.
The ROM on these older macs don't know about the L2 and L3 caches on
the CPUs, so the "drivers" that come with these cards turns on these
CPU caches. If you boot directly into linux without these caches on,
the machine will run, but you just won't get the speed and performance
this memory provides. There are ways to turn on the cache memory on
these cards, without the use of their MacOS drivers. Do a search on
the archives for "l2cr". It is a variable that lives in the /proc
directory, and if manipulated properly, will turn on the L2 / L3 cache
memories on G3 and G4 CPUs.
So yes - it is possible, but depending on your mac and the upgrade card
you want to use, you will run into varying levels of difficulty :)
cheers
vinai
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