Re: Debian 8 on Late 2005 G5, Graphics Issues
Wow! Thanks Peter!
I’d pretty much given up on getting nouveau graphics working on my G5 (I plan on using it as a headless server anyway, so graphics is not on the critical path).
This gives hope.
Here’s the data on my machine…
> root@bigal:~# getconf PAGESIZE
> 65536
> root@bigal:~# cat /proc/interrupts
> CPU0 CPU1
> 16: 324536 15894 MPIC 1 0 Level keywest i2c
> 18: 764 102621 MPIC 1 10 Level 0001:03:0c.0
> 25: 159 375469 MPIC-U3MSI 8 Edge eth0
> 27: 1 4 MPIC 1 27 Level keywest i2c
> 38: 29521 89263 MPIC 1 38 Level 0001:03:0d.0
> 39: 11 12 MPIC 1 39 Level firewire_ohci
> 48: 0 0 MPIC 1 48 Edge SMU message
> 53: 1621617 666640 MPIC 1 53 Edge SMU doorbell
> 63: 10 27 MPIC 1 63 Level ehci_hcd:usb1, ohci_hcd:usb3, ohci_hcd:usb4
> 70: 113 148 MPIC 1 70 Level ehci_hcd:usb2, ohci_hcd:usb5, ohci_hcd:usb6
> 251: 13836 368 MPIC 1 251 Edge ipi call function
> 252: 122217 108015 MPIC 1 252 Edge ipi reschedule
> 253: 0 0 MPIC 1 253 Edge ipi tick-broadcast
> 254: 0 0 MPIC 1 254 Edge ipi debugger
> LOC: 1186599 1736402 Local timer interrupts for timer event device
> LOC: 259 130 Local timer interrupts for others
> SPU: 78 46 Spurious interrupts
> PMI: 0 0 Performance monitoring interrupts
> MCE: 0 0 Machine check exceptions
> HMI: 0 0 Hypervisor Maintenance Interrupts
> root@bigal:~# lspci | grep -i vga
> 0000:0b:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600 LE] (rev a2)
> root@bigal:~# uname -a
> Linux bigal 4.0.0-2-powerpc64 #1 SMP Debian 4.0.5-1 (2015-06-16) ppc64 GNU/Linux
Interpreting the “/proc/interrupts” data is not obvious to me. Can you help?
Thanks!
Rick
PS: Do you have a ‘.deb’ for your re-compiled kernel? Or could you point me to a good description of what I would do to compile one of my own? Thanks in advance!
On Jun 28, 2015, at 10:48 PM, Peter Saisanas <psaisanas@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I also have a Powermac G5 Quad and tried with both the Geforce 6600 and Quadro FX4500 video cards and I have successfully gotten it up and running using the nouveau driver along with 2D acceleration on the XOrg desktop. I have compiled many newer kernels and created debian packages for them. Newer 4.0+ kernels also have issues in terms of detecting the nvidia DCB from the FCODE ROM… But there are other workarounds for this to get it up and running. You shouldn't need to use the boot parameter "nouveau.noaccel=1" once you have properly configured your kernel.
>
> In my case, the reason why X does not seem to work with your configuration is twofold:
>
> The recent Debian (and Fedora) kernels for PowerPC 64 Bit running on the G5 64bit powermac are configured with a 64Kb kernel pagesize. This works slightly better in terms of performance, however the nouveau driver does not support this size. You must recompile the kernel unfortunately and configure with 4Kb kernel pagesize as this is what nouveau will work with for now.
>
> To confirm, run the following command in a shell as root:
> “getconf PAGESIZE”
> If it returns 65536, you are using a 64Kb pagesize kernel.
> Otherwise if it returns 4096, i.e. 4Kb kernel pagesize, check the next item below.
>
> The newer nouveau drivers in more recent kernels default to using MSI interrupts, however with the PPC G5, when using MSI interrupts, the powerpc FCODE rom on Nvidia cards does not correctly set up the MSI address (or vector).
>
> To confirm, run the following command in a shell as root:
> “cat /proc/interrupts”
>
> Look for the nouveau interrupt, if it is using MSI interrupts, you need to disable MSI interrupts either by passing the option to the nouveau module, disable MSI interrupts by passing an option to the kernel command line in yaboot.conf or disable MSI interrupt support in total when compiling a new kernel. If configured correctly, nouveau should be using level or edge interrupts.
>
>
> This is what worked for me anyway.
>
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
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