Re: Question about the old PowerMac G5 quad

On Thu, Dec 9, 2021 at 10:23 AM Dennis Clarke via ppc <ppc@freebsd.org>
wrote:

>
> Dear ppc64 folks :
>
>     I have not tried FreeBSD CURRENT on anything ppc64 in a long while
> and was just curious what the state of affairs is like. Last time I did
> try running on my old PowerMac Quad G5 there were plenty of itty bitty
> little issues and more than a few big ones. Namely SMP is disabled. That
> was a show stopper. Another question would be, from your experience,
> what is the best hardware to run with? Something POWER8? The amazing
> Raptor Talos II wonderful POWER9 machines?  Any feedback would be a joy
> as I do see ppc is still Tier2 and that fascinates me given how valuable
> the IBM POWER world is within industry.
>
>
Hello,

I guess Raptor Talos II gives the best ppc64 experience, as it probably has
the most users, considering recent hardware only.
I was able to run Xfce on it reasonably well, with onboard VGA (LE works
best here, as BE has some color issues, but there are patches for some of
them).
Blackbird and S812L (POWER8) work well with CURRENT or 13-RELEASE too.
The main problem I had with S812L was its IPR storage controller, for which
there are no drivers.
I ended up using a PCI-e AHCI adapter with an external SATA disk to work
around this.



> --
> Dennis Clarke
> RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
> UNIX and Linux spoken
> GreyBeard and suspenders optional
>
>