• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Linux for PowerPC, a development journal thread

Corgi

Well-known member
At some point on one of the PPC threads I mentioned I was doing work on the Adélie Linux distribution, trying to bring up new media on PowerPC.

Wanted to give a bit of a progress update. Still no traction on Node.js for 32-bit, so Firefox is still unbuildable. The Solaris people have made a patch to have Firefox build without Node (since Node doesn't support Solaris either, apparently) but I'd rather see if I can make Node go first. There are some patches on the v8 bug tracker for adding ppc32 support back, and it seems like it might be feasible to integrate into Node.

I do have Firefox 91 running on a G5. Here is a screenshot of it running in XQuartz on my Mac Studio. Unfortunately I haven't figured out the green hue on the About box. It affects System/z and SPARC too, apparently.

firefox91-ppc64.png

I've also become the first critter (at least, as far as I can tell) to make the entire LLVM test suite pass on 32-bit PowerPC. My LLVM build targets everything, so you can now build code for RISC-V, NPX, AMD GPUs, etc from your G3 or newer:

[100%] Running the LLVM regression tests

Testing Time: 211.23s
Unsupported : 2373
Passed : 44493
Expectedly Failed: 146

The build was done on a Power9 system in 32-bit personality mode, hence the short time; it takes about two hours to run on a real Sawtooth.

64-bit PowerPC is now fully building, and passing tests, for the entire ~2300 package distro again. 32-bit has these failures: MariaDB, Node, Clang, CLucene, Freecell-Solver, GStreamer, and RRDtool. There are a few other failures that happen on all 32-bit arches so I'm not as worried about those. Since GStreamer is "low" in the tree (stuff like Qt requires it, so none of KDE has been built) I don't know how many more failures there will be. I'll try to keep everyone updated, and post media links when we have an ISO for G5s.
 

AndiS

Well-known member
Awesome. I'm going to pick up a G5 Tower next week. One more OS to run - and maybe actually use
 

CC_333

Well-known member
This is fun!

The last time I tried any Linux on an old PowerMac was when I installed Debian (I think 7 or 8? Whatever the last macppc build was before support was dropped) onto a G5 (a DP 2.0 GHz model, if I remember correctly). As I recall, it didn't work fully, however, and it wasn't terribly useful compared to Mac OS X on the same hardware, thanks largely to the existence of TenFourFox (this was about 8-10 years ago, however, so times have changed and Linux would probably be more useful now, if not faster, since TenFourFox is no longer being updated, and a modernish Linux distro can probably run a new or newish mainline Firefox build more efficiently with some effort).

c
 

AndiS

Well-known member
This is great to hear, since I am a Debian person anyway.

For 68k Macs (your other post), I'm not so much interested in running Linux anymore, but on a Quad G5 this is another story. I also have a Sun Ultra 45 (their last SPARC Workstation) where Debian is no longer really feasible. OpenBSD is somewhat and NetBSD always is. But as stated above, I prefer Debian since I use it daily and am therefore much more used to it.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
This is great to hear, since I am a Debian person anyway.

For 68k Macs (your other post), I'm not so much interested in running Linux anymore, but on a Quad G5 this is another story. I also have a Sun Ultra 45 (their last SPARC Workstation) where Debian is no longer really feasible. OpenBSD is somewhat and NetBSD always is. But as stated above, I prefer Debian since I use it daily and am therefore much more used to it.
If you don't tag them or click reply to them, they'll not see your answer unless they signed up for alerts in the thread, which they probably didn't.
 

ScutBoy

Well-known member
At some point on one of the PPC threads I mentioned I was doing work on the Adélie Linux distribution, trying to bring up new media on PowerPC.

Wanted to give a bit of a progress update. Still no traction on Node.js for 32-bit, so Firefox is still unbuildable. The Solaris people have made a patch to have Firefox build without Node (since Node doesn't support Solaris either, apparently) but I'd rather see if I can make Node go first. There are some patches on the v8 bug tracker for adding ppc32 support back, and it seems like it might be feasible to integrate into Node.

I do have Firefox 91 running on a G5. Here is a screenshot of it running in XQuartz on my Mac Studio. Unfortunately I haven't figured out the green hue on the About box. It affects System/z and SPARC too, apparently.



I've also become the first critter (at least, as far as I can tell) to make the entire LLVM test suite pass on 32-bit PowerPC. My LLVM build targets everything, so you can now build code for RISC-V, NPX, AMD GPUs, etc from your G3 or newer:

[100%] Running the LLVM regression tests

Testing Time: 211.23s
Unsupported : 2373
Passed : 44493
Expectedly Failed: 146

The build was done on a Power9 system in 32-bit personality mode, hence the short time; it takes about two hours to run on a real Sawtooth.

64-bit PowerPC is now fully building, and passing tests, for the entire ~2300 package distro again. 32-bit has these failures: MariaDB, Node, Clang, CLucene, Freecell-Solver, GStreamer, and RRDtool. There are a few other failures that happen on all 32-bit arches so I'm not as worried about those. Since GStreamer is "low" in the tree (stuff like Qt requires it, so none of KDE has been built) I don't know how many more failures there will be. I'll try to keep everyone updated, and post media links when we have an ISO for G5s.
NIce! Thanks for the hard work! Sparc will be fun :)
 
Top