[rescue] IBM IntelliStation POWER5 9111-285

[Mark Benson]

On 30 Jan 2012, at 07:53, Charles Monett wrote:

> That's just a PCI ID change in the kernel source(I've run nearly the
> whole set of those under the same code - 4500, 6500, 6000) if I'm not
> mistaken.   Those boards aren't too terribly different from each other
> as far as Linux will see them.  About the only other Linux-side issue
> might be color flipping in X11 - if you have a 64bit userland.

The kernel patch that the Crux PPC team rolled is very simple if you
know your way around the PPC Kernel code, but no-one submitted it to the
code tree for the official PPC kernel development so it's never been
rolled into the main kernel.

The colour flipping occurs in X11 if you don't patch the kernel (I assume
therefore there's a fix for the framebuffers that are supported in the
ppc64 kernel as you have to use fbdev drivers anyway).

Given a serial console and a few hours you could probably patch Debian,
or even better roll a patch for Debian and place it in their source tree
for Wheezy for testing, and solve the issue. I just don't know how, I'm not
a kernel developer ^_^

> Just how bad has it gotten for Linux on POWER?   I thought it atrophied
> a bit, but I could be mistaken.

It's actually passable. Debian is still current on PPC as is Crux. Fedora
has a current (F16) development version but I haven't tried it as yet.
OpenSUSE
is stuck at 11.1. SUSE and RedHat do current paid versions supported by IBM.

I'm kinda hacked off CentOS dropped PPC a couple of years back. RHEL runs on
PPC
so it's kind of a no-brainer to roll CentOS for it, I guess they got fed up
of
all the Mac users who didn't like the colour of the carpet ;)


--

Mark Benson

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