Living the dreamm~ PowerMac G5

[adespoton]

I'm also no expert, but that's my understanding too; G4 adds AltiVec, a proper SMP implementation and a few related instruction extensions, mostly to do with hardware acceleration pipelines. In other words, as far as the instruction set itself goes, AltiVec is the big thing; most of the other changes were to do with how it interfaced with the rest of the hardware.

 

[Link4Electronics]

One interesting finding is that ArchPOWER uses ELFv2 from OpenPOWER Foundation

according to the internet, ELFv2 ABI provides significant performance and efficiency advantages over the ELFv1 ABI on PowerPC64:
No Function Descriptors, Reduced Call Costs, Optimized Parameter Passing, Streamlined Stack Frame, Improved Position-Independent Code (PIC), Optimized Main Modules and Modern Toolchain Support.

I may be wrong but I think Debian PPC64 still uses ELFv1.
Started compiling binaries for PPC32, they're at my repo on github.

Best regards,
Link.

 

[herd]

The G4 is basically a faster G3 with altivec tacked on, isn't it?

I've heard that too.

https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/ppc750gx-vs-ppc750gl.39043/post-554049

 

[Powerbase]

Was going to say the same, but the previous G3 versus G4 discussion was already linked.

 

[CC_333]

Interesting! I had forgotten, but I do vaguely remember reading that thread when it was current.

That said, it's now firmly established that, as far as implementation goes, the G4 is more or less a G3 with a 3x faster bus, AltiVec and various other enhancements and improvements. However, is the G4's instruction set otherwise relatively similar to a G3, such that a binary compiled, without AltiVec, for a G4 could run unmodified on a G3?? The reverse (G3 binary running unmodded on a G4) is certainly true.

c

 

[Link4Electronics]

Compiled Aerofoil (glider pro), works fine too

Best regards,
Link.

 

[Link4Electronics]

Yeah, well, brought Altivec and G4, etc., into discussion because I thought would have a problem when compiling 32-bit packages due to platforms that don't have Altivec, but checked "makepkg.conf" file and for powerpc (32-bit) arch in archpower, it doesn't use Altivec as a target, only Linux kernel uses Altivec. So PowerPC packages will work from a PowerPC 604 up to the Nintendo Wii, G3, and G4. The Nintendo Wii U has a special branch called "espresso" since it's based on 750 G3 with SMP but without Altivec.
Posted a new video making some maintenance on G5 and new games running on it.

My plan is to keep pushing this platform on linux, I think it can go further.

Best regards,
Link.

 

[Andrew-R]

Yeah, well, brought Altivec and G4, etc., into discussion because I thought would have a problem when compiling 32-bit packages due to platforms that don't have Altivec, but checked "makepkg.conf" file and for powerpc (32-bit) arch in archpower, it doesn't use Altivec as a target, only Linux kernel uses Altivec. So PowerPC packages will work from a PowerPC 604 up to the Nintendo Wii, G3, and G4. The Nintendo Wii U has a special branch called "espresso" since it's based on 750 G3 with SMP but without Altivec.
Posted a new video making some maintenance on G5 and new games running on it.

My plan is to keep pushing this platform on linux, I think it can go further.

Best regards,
Link.

Can you also test if cinelerra-gg works on Linux/ppc64 ?

I tested ppc32 variant on qemu, but 64bit emulation there is not so fast for my host, so if anyone can test our git tree at

https://git.cinelerra-gg.org/goodguy/cinelerra.git

I'll be happy to hear your results/errors.

In theory build should be simple
install autoreconf and friends
run ./autogen.sh
then check blds/bld_prepare.sh for libraries needed
then run
./configure --with-single-user

if it finished without errors type make and make install.

After some time and 2 Gb of hdd space later you should have bin folder in the root of our source tree (where autogen.sh file located)

ran it "bin/cin" for X terminal or set DISPLAY to your another machine X server or Xephyr for example.

Four windows should appear, then you can load video files, alter them, and render them out.

Documentation at

Installation

Installation

download.cinelerra-gg.org

 

[Link4Electronics]

Hello,

Happy new year!
Tried to compile cinelerra-gg but it's failing to compile x265 because of altivec, already tried to use -mno-altivec for C and CXX flags but no dice. Funny though that library x265 is already provided by ArchPOWER and I have it installed system-wide. An alternative is kdenlive which works on powerpc.

Meanwhile, compiled LeoCAD (Lego Designer on PowerPC!) and Freecad


Best regards,
Link.

 

[Andrew-R]

Hello,

Happy new year!
Tried to compile cinelerra-gg but it's failing to compile x265 because of altivec, already tried to use -mno-altivec for C and CXX flags but no dice. Funny though that library x265 is already provided by ArchPOWER and I have it installed system-wide. An alternative is kdenlive which works on powerpc.

Meanwhile, compiled LeoCAD (Lego Designer on PowerPC!) View attachment 93991and Freecad
View attachment 93992

Best regards,
Link.

Thanks for trying!

You can disable internal x256 build with

--disable-x265 configure switch, or just disable whole thirdparty build with --without-thirdparty (but then you may need some patience installing -devel dependencies or disable components one by one because configure's logic incomplete for this case).

I'll look into how ArchPOWER compiles x265, probably by just disabling asm support? But may be there is patch!

 

[Link4Electronics]

Hi,

x265 is compiled without altivec on archpower, probably is causing issues

archpower/x265/PKGBUILD at fd47685291dd0243162afc98ecbaf75349a4d7e7 · kth5/archpower

Unofficial Archlinux port to powerpc64le, powerpc64 and powerpc - kth5/archpower

github.com

Arch Linux embbed headers libraries (like "-dev" packages on debian) with its packages.

I'll try to compile --without-thirdparty later then.

Regards,
Link.