On Wed, 24 May 2000, Tony Mantler wrote:

> My PowerMac 5200 uses a design almost identical to a PPC upgraded Q630, and
> the big stumbling blocks I've hit (in porting linux) are a: modifying bootx
> to tell me I'm not on a real powermac (I don't have codewarrior) and b:
> grokking the undocumented weirdness of the bridge chip.

I've got a patched copy of BootX that doesn't crash on the 5200 (at least
when booting the mach kernel).  If you want, I'll email it to anyone
interested.  BTW, the MkLinux booter gets things going a long way on a
Q950 w/ PPC card, so it might get pretty far on the 700, too.  The big
things missing were the interrupt handling code (which may work now, but
hasn't been tested due to problems much earlier in booting on the 6214 I
have sitting in my room), and... well, that's about it.  :-)  Oh, and the
Q950 would've been a pill b/c of the IOP's, but....  Oh well.


> There's also other fun little details, like the 5200 (and assumably 68k
> upgrades) are, unlike an untouched 68k or real powermac, not
> cache-coherent, though that shouldn't affect *too* too much.

Well, neither are the x100 PowerMacs, IIRC.  Not a big deal.  ;-)


> Anyways, that's the short answer. For the long answer, ask David
> Gatwood. :) 

Heheh.


David

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