Fedora 5 {test,development} on G5?

Peter Seebach seebs at plethora.net
Wed Feb 1 18:58:31 UTC 2006


In message <91f88ee20602010544o33b3f528t575de9fe52417350 at mail.gmail.com>, Chase
creek Systemhouse writes:
>On 2/1/06, Peter Seebach <seebs at plethora.net> wrote:
>> Hi!  I have been told that I must make a very fast PPC system run Linux, as
>> soon as possible.

>Speed?  As in a fast build or "fast/quick" operation?  I built my iMac
>350MHz system in 3 hours - but once installed it performs quite well.

Both.  I am to build the system as soon as possible, and it needs to have
tolerable performance running a CPU simulator (which I am told is
multithreaded).

>> With FC5 "development", I got a bootable CD (yay!), then spent a day
>> downloading RPMs.  At the end of this, I tried to run the install.  I
>> pointed the installer at the Fedora/ppc64 (I am a ppc64, yes?) directory

>Actually, the G5 processor is 128-bits but ... The Linux "G5" can run
>the PPC32 branch at the very least -- it probably should run PPC64 but
>why choose 64 bits?  The G5 will perform under PPC32 quite well for a
>production system -- 64 bits (while others may argue otherwise) is
>mainly for very high end database applications.

At least one person has told me that I must use a PPC64 kernel to boot at all
on a G5.

I don't know what you mean by asserting that the G5 is 128-bits.  The most
relevant features (default ALU size and address space) are both 64, which I
assume is the distinction made between ppc and ppc64.  That said, this is a
machine with under 4G of memory (had to compromise somewhere), so I can
probably get away with plain-old, if it's supposed to run at all.

>> on the machine I did the downloads on, and it said it was fetching
>> "Fedora/base/stage2.img".  Then it announced that these files did not match
>> my boot media.

>The Rescue CD is PPC64 -- try starting the installer off that.

You can run the installer from the rescue CD?  Cool.

>> 1.  Am I even barking up the right tree?  Do quad G5's run Linux?  Do they
>> run Fedora in particular?  Are test/development releases the way to go?
>> 2.  Assuming it might be productive for me to install a test release, is
>> there some obvious pilot error in trying to boot from the boot.iso image
>> and load the files from .../development/ppc64?

>Don't know per se; why not try the PPC32 Rawhide branch
>Historically the PPC64 is for the PPC9xx series of (AIX-related)
>PowerPC processors (but I could be wrong about that so YMMV.)

Well, yes.  And the G5 is a PPC970; in this case, a pair of PPC970FX.

>Personally, I would try the FC5T2 PPC32 branch before surrendering.

I will try just about anything, but I was hoping that someone had actually
run one of these and could confirm that it would run; downloads are running
about a day per ISO set, and I was supposed to be running this on Monday at
the latest, or ideally about three days before they told me about the
project.

-s




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