Re: PowerMac 8500 (summary)

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt
Date: Sun Oct 26 2003 - 12:08:57 EST


On Mon, 2003-10-20 at 18:28, John Mock wrote:

> PowerMac 8500 (PPC) has more serious problems, its console display is broken
> and it currently cannot come up multi-user, making it difficult to examine
> the problem. Eventually, i'll hook up a serial console and at least look
> at that problem. Since 2.4.21 works fine for me, this isn't a major issue
> for me personally. Given our winter power and summer heat, i wish software
> suspend worked for the PPC...
>
> Attached is a summary of the current issues for me, please write if you
> would like additional details on any of these, especially those not yet
> reported on.

Regarding the pmac 8500, I'd appreciate some tests with the kernel
at bk://ppc.bkbits.net/linuxppc-2.5-benh

Also, please CC me issues relative to PowerMacs in general, or at
least CC them to linuxppc-dev, as I may miss them in the lkml traffic.

> Outstanding issues for PowerMac 8500
>
> 'drivers/block/swim3.c' won't compile, seems to be missing a couple of
> #includes's (and still gets a couple of warnings). Bug report filed,
> temporary patch suggested.

Real patch on the way. Right now, Linus tree is frozen regarding my
driver updates though, and it's ok as far as I'm concerned, I think
we'll have pmac support fully merged with 2.6.0.

> Many other modules get compilation warnings. Bug report filed.

CC me please, and test my tree as it's where the patches will come
from ultimately ;)

> PPC gets one 'oops' per SCSI disk during boot up. Bug report filed.

Known problem. Seem to be a HW bug triggered by the slab debug code,
I need to spend more time figuring out exactly what's going on in the
chip.

> Contrary to earlier reports, RAID5 seems to work fine on PPC (on -test7 at
> least).

Good.

> Console comes up in an unusable video mode, specifically, sync is good, but
> it appears to have wrong number of bits per scanline.

There are several problems with controlfb and the new fbcon that I
haven't fully figured out yet. Though it works for me when I boot
(but strangely fails when I switch back to VT from X).

> X eventually resets it to good video mode on test7-bk7, but X doesn't work
> with an ADB keyboard (and it even doesn't get that far under -test8)

Ah ? Works fine here.

> Currently can only test over network (and as noted, test7-bk7 was last
> kernel i tried that even got that far.
>
> May no longer fit on floppy, somewhat dangerous given i can't boot from CD
> (not even MacOS) and have RAID5 root/usr.

I fixed vmlinux.coff so it boots from network at least, quik should work
with small kernels, but I posted a quik patch that may help with larger
kernels. I plan to add yaboot support for oldworld sooner or later that
will deal with that issue as well.
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