OS X on a 5400? |
November, 01, 2002 1:43 PM |
evilrich |
Hi I have been foolish enough to try installing OS X (10.1.4) on my PowerMac 5400 using XPostFacto - with a limited amount of success. (By success, I mean I can get the kernel to boot. Yay!) The 5400 is an all-one-machine, based on an Alchemy mobo. This one has a 180MHz 603e+ and 104MB of RAM. A bit underpowered for OS X, but my main Mac, a Tanzania-based Starmax with a G3 card, is unsupported by XPF. (Hint, hint. ;-) I should point out first that this is my first experience with OS X, so go easy on me. I'm not terribly clued-up on BSD, but I have been running Linux on Macs for a while and can find my way around open firmware. Okay, so the first problem is that the OS X kernel will only boot on this machine when kbd and screen are chosen as the open firmware input and output devices, respectively. Anything else, and absolutely nothing happens. Is this normal? I want to be able to use a serial console because the 640x480x8 screenmode that the OS X console uses is just too small to be useful and error messages just whizz by. Is there a boot parameter you can pass to the kernel to get it to use a serial console? (When a serial console is chosen for OF input and output, nothing happens after the OF boot command is issued. Nothing on the terminal. No action on screen.) Or is there someway to scroll back on the OS X terminal? Or is it possible to change the screenmode that it uses? (It ignores the OF screen settings.) Another pecularity with the boot process is that when you use XPF to boot OS X, it takes a couple of resets before it will successfully boot the kernel. On the first go, it comes up 'Changing configuration' or something similar, and resets. As expected. Then, on the second boot, I get a 'Default claim' error and the machine just halts. On the third try, again it reports a 'Default claim' error, but this time it carries on booting, and brings up the Apple logo splash screen. This is no big deal - just annoying. Is it due to the disk not spinning up quickly enough? Or is this normal behaviour? The third problem is that the MESH SCSI interface in the 5400 doesn't work. Not quite sure why. It does recognize the CD-ROM attached, but lots of weird and wonderful error messages are reported, such as 'MESH chip does not respond to command' and 'Target hung: message in timeout'. I read somewhere on this site that termination may be an issue, but since this devices works perfectly in OS9.x and Linux, I wouldn't think that likely. (I have no idea if the bus is properly terminated - this is an all-one-in machine and the SCSI cabling is buried deep in its bowels - but the CD-ROM is the only device on the chain, and you can usually get away without a terminator at the device end in such cases) Of course the non-functioning SCSI CD-ROM drive means I can't install from the install disc. The kernel boots, but halts when it cannot find a root filesystem. I have had a certain amount of success booting from a copy of the install disc dragged onto a spare HFS+ partition. Sometimes the kernel boots, sometimes it doesn't, but I cannot find what causes the machine to decide. When it doesn't boot, it spews a lot of error messages and traces, but again these fly by too quickly to read. The times that it does boot, the install process eventually just hangs. I've tried playing with the 'single-user mode' to boot into a shell, with some success. Everything there works as expected (except that there's no command history and no 'more' command!) From here, I can manually execute the commands in the /etc/rc.cdrom start-up script, and everything works up until it launches the window manager service. This eventually freezes the machine with no ouput or error messages. It doesn't respond to a break signal and the only thing to do is reset. I suspect the problem here is that there's no driver for the Valkyrie framebuffer device in the 5400. I am right? Or is it broken? (If there isn't a driver, then since the Valkyrie is just a dumb framebuffer, writing one shouldn't prove to be too difficult.) Is OS X not happy simply using a framebuffer via the open firemware interface? Well, that's me out of questions for just now. Has anybody else tried installing on a 5400 and had any more success than me? If anybody's interested, I've dumped the output of 'dmesg' and 'sysctl -a' from the single-user console to files in the hope that this information might be useful to somebody to help figure out what's going on. These can be downloaded from: http://www.rcdrummond.net/stuff/osx_logs_20021101.zip Cheers, Rich |
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RE: OS X on a 5400? |
November, 10, 2002 5:51 PM |
OSXGuru |
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I'm not sure how to affect the screen resolution that the Mac OS X console uses, unfortunately. I don't think it is possible to use a serial console (of course, you can use a serial console with Open Firmware, but I don't think it is possible once the kernel takes over. It would be a useful feature, come to think of it. You can enable kprintf messages over the serial port, though). I'm getting basically the same kind of MESH errors on my 6500. It may be a termination issue, possibly, or it may be a bug in the driver. One thing I would like to do sometime is read through the NetBSD MESH driver and see whether there is anything I could modify to make this work better. I've got a 6360 myself now, which is also based on Alchemy, so I should be able to make some progress soon. (I'm going to have to install some more memory first). It's just a question of time--it's hard to fit everything in that deserves to be done. The "changing configuration" thing is something that I've seen on the original Powerbook G3 sometimes. I'm not sure exactly what it means. The "default CLAIM" is a generic Open Firmware error message. Open Firmware is a little buggy on all these old machines--the NVRAM patches deal with some of it, but not all (and they are difficult to comprehend, let alone fix). Pierre d'Herbemont has done some work on a Valkyrie video driver (he's the one who is responsible for much of the progress on the Alchemy stuff). OS X will need a driver for it, or at least so it appears. You won't get a bootable copy of the Mac OS X install CD by dragging--you'll need to use something like a recent version of Apple Software Restore in order to copy all the Unix permissions, symbolic link settings and the like. (Though, actually, you've gotten farther than I would have thought you could get that way). The dmesg text is interesting. The "MESH: ProcessMSGI - unsupported message: rejected" looks very interesting. I wonder whether this version of the MESH chip is a little different than some of the others? The other thing that would be interesting is the output from ioreg. Something like ioreg -l As I say, I've got a 6360, and hope to have time to work on some of this soon. The other thing that might be interesting to try is to install Darwin, since it may be able to operated without the video driver. |
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RE: OS X on a 5400? |
November, 01, 2002 6:16 PM |
evilrich |
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I apologize for the lack of paragraph breaks. I guess this forum expects HTML formatting in posts . . . |
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