The default driver/mode used for PowerMac G5 Radeon 9800PRO's messes up all normal text display by default...

[Mark Millard]

Hi.

FYI: I've been building and trying Jean-Sébastien Pédron's kms-drm-update-38 branch when Jean requested (sometimes with patches that Jean provided). This was to give Jean some (indirect) access to a powerpc64 (PowerMac G5) Radeon context for some radeonkms development. (Jean had been hoping to get my card going in that context.) We got to the point that a kldload for radeonkms did not complain/refuse but the display was then munged up and the driver could not find the Video BIOS. The fact that it is a Radeon X1950 for the video hardware may make it odder than usual for PowerMac G5 Radeons. But it is the only Radeon that I have access to for G5's. (The card works in Mac OS X 10.5.)

As for my using the G5s on my own: In more recent times I build powerpc64/GENRIC64 10.x variants with both vt and sc (so no ps3 support since it does not have sc support). Then I boot whichever seems to work best for the video hardware, display size, and usage combination that I intend. (I tend to move the same SSD between G5 contexts.)

I also have access to a NVIDIA card I could put in place instead if I wanted or needed to. But that would duplicate another PowerMac G5 context that I have access to.

My FreeBSD activity is personal and my work activity in recent times has stopped me from being noticeably active with FreeBSD for a while: I've basically only been occasionally doing something Jean has requested. So the above material is actually old and technically I do not yet know what a vt and sc (no ps3) 10.1-RELEASE variant would be like for the issues. (Not that I expect a lot of changes of status from early November.) When I get back to FreeBSD I'll probably track 10.1-STABLE mostly as far as strictly personal use goes.

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Mark Millard
markmi at dsl-only.net

On Nov 21, 2014, at 3:43 PM, Justin Hibbits <jrh29 at alumni.cwru.edu> wrote:

Just catching this.  The radeon.ko driver is barely functional for
PowerPC.  I recommend removing it before trying again (we should just
disable it, since it's useless right now, and instead put effort into
getting the radeonkms working).

- Justin