On 9/8/25 6:45 PM, Cedar Maxwell wrote:
On Sun, 2025-09-07 at 13:16 -0600, Stan Johnson wrote:On 9/5/25 6:27 PM, Cedar Maxwell wrote:... Would you send your xorg.conf, etc., please? I can only seem to get Xorg to launch by passing in video=ofonly. I can't get it to work with fbdev either. ...I've been testing kernels on my Wallstreet using a current Gentoo distribution. I noticed this morning that mainline kernel v6.1, compiled using the attached .config file, works in Gentoo, but not in Debian SID. In Debian, I can see the X11 login screen, but the keyboard and mouse don't respond. In Gentoo, everything works as expected. In Debian SID, I'm using Xfce, sysvinit-core instead of systemd, and wdm instead of lightdm. In Gentoo, I noticed elogind was installed; elogind was not installed in Debian. Using "apt-get install elogind" to install elogind, systemd was removed, as well as xserver-org and some X11-related files, so of course X11 doesn't work at all now, and I'll need to restore from a backup. Interestingly, I'm not having similar issues with PB Lombard or Pismo. My BootX configuration is as follows (working X11 in 6.1.0 in Gentoo): Kernel: vmlinux-6.1.0-pmac (custom kernel, no modules) Boot Device: /dev/sda13 (Gentoo partition) More kernel arguments: video=atyfb:vmode:14,cmode:32,mclk:71 No video driver: checked Options: Force SCSI ON: checked Force video settings: checked Use specified RAM disk: not checkedChecking "No video driver" appears to pass in video=ofonly. How is your performance with this configuration? Mine is borderline unusable. mclk:71 makes everything green.
As a test, I installed the latest Debian SID on a Pismo, so I get systemd and all of the badness that it has for slow, memory-constrained systems (my Pismo has 512 MiB memory).
Interestingly, I don't pass "video=aty128fs:1024x768" to the kernel (via yaboot) as I have in the past, yet it still works, though about twice as slowly as using sysvinit (or rcinit in Gentoo). So I guess it must be using "video=ofonly".
My intention is to copy my Debian SID and Gentoo root filesystems from my Pismo to my Wallstreet, but to do this I need to have at least dump version 0.4b49 to reliably dump and restore filesystems on powerpc. So I'm having to update Gentoo now on Pismo to update dump.
# dump --version ... dump 0.4b47 ...I think checking "No video driver" but also specifying "video=atyfb..." will pass "video=atyfb..." to the kernel. Unfortunately, a kernel regression seems to have broken previously working X11 on the Wallstreet (I haven't heard back from the developer yet). I tried installing Debian SID 08/29/2025 directly on the Wallstreet by booting into the installtion vmlinux and initrd.gz, but I couldn't get it to work, even using a serial console. If my tests are accurate, the Wallstreet should eventually work with the Debian rootfs that I installed on my Pismo (except for X11).
On the Pismo, I had to install wdm and specify it as my display manager instead of lightdm in Debian SID 08/29/2025, otherwise I would only get a text login. It also took me a while to install everything that's useful that Debian doesn't include, such as telnet, telnetd, ftp, vsftpd, ifconfig, netstat, dump, etc. For now I'm leaving systemd installed in Debian on the Pismo and running Debian's default kernel and initrd (vmlinux-6.16.3+deb14-powerpc and initrd.img-6.16.3+deb14-powerpc). I'll replace systemd with sysvinit and try a custom kernel after I copy the Debian rootfs to the Wallstreet.
On the Pismo, X11 in Gentoo (with just a clock and two xterms running) is mostly usable and about twice as fast as using Xfce in Debian SID. The same setup is also usable (but just barely) in Gentoo on the Wallstreet, with kernel 6.1.
I'll probably end up using whatever .config file the developer who investigates the possible kernel regressions recommends. I'm not using an xorg.conf file in either Debian SID or Gentoo (I haven't needed to use an xorg.conf file since Debian 7.8 in Sparc64). For now I'll be sticking with Gentoo for these particular kernel regression tests.