Living the dreamm~ PowerMac G5

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.
 
One interesting finding is that ArchPOWER uses ELFv2 from OpenPOWER Foundation
1763589317250.png
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.
 
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
 
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.
 
Link4Electronics said:
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.
Click to expand...

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


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
 
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!) Screenshot_2025-12-23_13-27-15.pngand Freecad
Screenshot_2025-12-24_22-18-00.png

Best regards,
Link.
 
Link4Electronics said:
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.
Click to expand...

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!
 
https://disk.yandex.ru/d/d4Fs_YNL4jZbLA - 1.8 Gb image, if you want to play with it on qemu.

Code: 
sha256sum /mnt/sdc1/More_QEMU/5gb_ppc_le-compressed.qcow
9300ce74a3007e326bd2461c2f89f33c837619cc5a420052b49d202b9e476d73  /mnt/sdc1/More_QEMU/5gb_ppc_le-compressed.qcow

Code: 
qemu-system-ppc64 -hda /dev/shm/5gb_ppc_le.qcow -m 1G -cpu POWER8 -accel tcg,tb-size=256

user: root
password: toor
 
Andrew-R said:
Got cinelerra-gg working on Arch/ppc64le (send simple patch for guicast/makefile to our mail list), actual x264 render sadly corrupted at some frames?

mastodon.online

Andrew_R (@Andrew_R@mastodon.online)

Attached: 1 image More Arch for POWER8 (emulated)
mastodon.online mastodon.online
Click to expand...
This is cool™!
Andrew-R said:
https://disk.yandex.ru/d/d4Fs_YNL4jZbLA - 1.8 Gb image, if you want to play with it on qemu.

Code: 
sha256sum /mnt/sdc1/More_QEMU/5gb_ppc_le-compressed.qcow
9300ce74a3007e326bd2461c2f89f33c837619cc5a420052b49d202b9e476d73  /mnt/sdc1/More_QEMU/5gb_ppc_le-compressed.qcow

Code: 
qemu-system-ppc64 -hda /dev/shm/5gb_ppc_le.qcow -m 1G -cpu POWER8 -accel tcg,tb-size=256

user: root
password: toor
Click to expand...
I'd be more interested in the patches applied, already have a qemu VM for archpower ppc64le 😅 but thanks for sharing anyway!
Andrew-R said:
Another application to try might be Bochs from git, you can grab Geforce bioses from discussion and see how far win95 can go ;)

github.com

GitHub - bochs-emu/Bochs: Bochs - Cross Platform x86 Emulator Project

Bochs - Cross Platform x86 Emulator Project. Contribute to bochs-emu/Bochs development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com
Click to expand...
Dosbox-staging already works and it does have a dynrec for powerpc (despite the current maintainer of dosbox-staing is kinda toxic person who doesn't like PowerPC or big-endian for not a really good reason, personally I like Dosbox-x more but there's no ppc jit for it) It's possible to install windows95/98 on dosbox-staging but iirc it's a very convoluted process with some caveats.

Qemu on archpower works too but it's very unstable when emulating x86 or other platforms, it emulates ppc fine though (powerpc emulating powerpc, inception, adorable).

Best regards,
Link.
 
Last edited:
Link4Electronics said:
This is cool™!

I'd be more interested in the patches applied, already have a qemu VM for archpower ppc64le 😅 but thanks for sharing anyway!

Dosbox-staging already works and it does have a dynrec for powerpc (despite the current maintainer of dosbox-staing is kinda toxic person who doesn't like PowerPC or big-endian for not a really good reason, personally I like Dosbox-x more but there's no ppc jit for it) It's possible to install windows95/98 on dosbox-staging but iirc it's a very convoluted process with some caveats.

Qemu on archpower works too but it's very unstable when emulating x86 or other platforms, it emulates ppc fine though (powerpc emulating powerpc, inception, adorable).

Best regards,
Link.
Click to expand...


patch should be already in our git, so you can pull inside your ppc64le VM and see how it builds there with --without-thirdparty (I also disabled libdpx and lv2).

Does x264 encoder by itself works on ppc64le as in Arch POWER distro? For me it was failing at some frames, x265 worked fine but was slow. xvid worked fine too. So I guess chain cingg -> libavcodec - > encoders generally work, just not for x264 for some reason?
 
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