Heat-death of the last of the 2-socket/2-cores-each PowerMac G5s that I have access to

[Mark Millard]

On 2021-Jan-13, at 11:00, Brandon Bergren <bdragon at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 12, 2021, at 2:54 PM, Mark Millard via freebsd-ppc wrote:
>> WARNING: Device "openfirm" is Giant locked and may be deleted before 
>> FreeBSD 13.0.
> 
> I am planning on getting around to this one at some point.

Good to know.

>> WARNING: Device "kbd" is Giant locked and may be deleted before FreeBSD 
>> 13.0.
> 
> This one isn't just powerpc, I don't believe.

Okay. I do not remember seeing the notice for the amd64, aaarch64, or armv7
example systems that I have access to. (But I've not rechecked to confirm.)

>> I've not seen any evidence that anyone intends to work on
>> avoiding those uses of the Giant lock. There is also, on some
>> G4's that I have access to,
>> 
>> WARNING: Device "agp" is Giant locked and may be deleted before FreeBSD 
>> 13.0.
> 
> There is some pressure to remove AGP entirely and rely on PCI mappings instead (which are slower IIRC but may possibly still have decent performance with modern object management techniques that the drivers have. Will need testing.)
> 
> AGP is kind of a weird case because of what it is and how it works, and how it interacts with everything else.

Interesting.

>> WARNING: Device "consolectl" is Giant locked and may be deleted before 
>> FreeBSD 13.0.
> 
> Might need to migrate some bits over to vt at some point.
> 

FYI for vt vs sc:

My memory is that the 2-socket/1-core-each G5 that I have access
to dies a very early boot-failure for vt and I have to use sc on
it. (It is possible I've got things backwards. I've not validated
the status in some time, using things just in the working form.)

As I remember there used to be some other G5/video card combination
were I also had the reverse for what failed vs what worked, although
the boot-failure details were different if I remember right. (Much
larger pixel-count display involved in the boot-failure case?)



Given the slush and the scheduled stable/13 branch in a little over
a week, I did not know if Giant dependency was a "support stops
here" type of issue for 13 or not.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)