Getting closer to Classic on Linux on ppc64le

A recurring theme here is my personal opinion that OpenPOWER workstations like the Raptor family (particularly now that the Blackbird is a lower-cost option) are the Power Mac successors Power Mac holdouts should embrace. It's the same processor family, it's an open system, and Raptor machines have that pride of hand-built quality and solid engineering we got accustomed to with our G4 and G5 machines. We're still missing the ability to use KVM-PR to boot Mac OS 9 in QEMU on OpenPOWER systems, but with recent improvements in QEMU and a few third-party assists, I'm now to the point where I can nevertheless use my old Mac OS 9 apps productively like FrameMaker and Photoshop 7. If you run your own QEMU builds with -O3 -mcpu=power9 performance is more than enough for these apps and you can get the work done well. In the screenshot you can see me using Photoshop to make a demo image and saving it to the shared folder, which I then opened up in GNOME's image viewer to prove it transferred over. Et voila.

There are still some pain points left (other than the lack of working KVM-PR in Mac OS 9); sound is still somewhat of a work in progress if it works at all and there is no copy-paste. Many games won't work properly either. However, QEMU Mac OS 9 guests can (with assistance) now support tablets with now much more natural mouse movement, using ndrv you can run at multiple convenient resolutions, files can be exchanged over AFP via Netatalk, and if you're willing to put up with a little clock madness QEMU can "sleep" so that you're not sucking CPU cycles in the background.

You'll need an ISO and/or CDROM of Mac OS 9 to get started. I won't provide you this and merely assume you have a perfectly legal source for one, such as ripping the installation CD you already own. (I own several.) Some of these steps I've already gone through in our earlier QEMU articles but they are reproduced here for convenience. These instructions are not OpenPOWER-specific in general and should work for other Linux systems (I'm on Fedora).

• Create your disk image, usually qemu-img create -f qcow2 classic.img 40G or some such. We will refer to this image as classic.img in the example commands below.

• If not already configured set up tap networking, typically with something like this for tap0, with your username being billg:

  sudo ip tuntap add dev tap0 mode tap user billg
  sudo ip link set tap0 up promisc on
  sudo brctl addif virbr0 tap0 (optional, but handy for libvert)

  This will persist until reboot.

• Download the custom video driver qemu_vga.ndrv from Github. I put it in ndrv/qemu_vga.ndrv.

• Set up your initial boot string. Mine looks like this, assuming you're booting from your Mac OS 9 ISO (in iso/922.iso):

  qemu-system-ppc -M mac99,accel=tcg,via=pmu -m 1536 -drive id=root,file=classic.img,format=qcow2,l2-cache-size=4M -usb -netdev tap,id=mynet0,ifname=tap0,script=no,downscript=no -device rtl8139,netdev=mynet0 -rtc base=localtime -L ndrv -prom-env resolutions=640x480,800x600,1024x768,1152x864,1280x800,1440x900,1920x1080 -boot d -cdrom "iso/922.iso"

  This gives you the maximum 1.5GB of RAM Mac OS 9 supports. You'll notice we haven't enabled the tablet yet; we'll get to that.

• Start up Mac OS 9 and install to your hard disk. When this is done, shut down the emulated Mac (QEMU will close).

• Download our "essentials" ISO from the Floodgap gopher server (Firefox will need either OverbiteWX or OverbiteNX). It contains this USB tablet driver, the freeware 1.4 version of USB Overdrive, the Network Time control panel (for talking to RFC 868 and NTP servers) and an RTL8139 Ethernet extension. Uncompress it and bring up your system booting from the hard disk image but with the ISO ready. We'll assume it's in iso/essential.iso:

  qemu-system-ppc -M mac99,accel=tcg,via=pmu -m 1536 -boot c -drive id=root,file=classic.img,format=qcow2,l2-cache-size=4M -usb -netdev tap,id=mynet0,ifname=tap0,script=no,downscript=no -device rtl8139,netdev=mynet0 -rtc base=localtime -L ndrv -prom-env resolutions=640x480,800x600,1024x768,1152x864,1280x800,1440x900,1920x1080 -cdrom "iso/essential.iso"

• Mac OS 9 should have StuffIt Expander built-in. Uncompress USB Tablet and put it in the System Folder's Startup Items (it's an app, not an INIT or CDEV). Uncompress the RTL8139 extension and put it in System Folder, Extensions. The others are optional but recommended; uncompress and install as they direct. Set your desired screen resolution of the ones available (I use 1440x900 on my 1080p display) and shut down again. Here's our last boot string change, adding the tablet this time:

  qemu-system-ppc -M mac99,accel=tcg,via=pmu -m 1536 -boot c -drive id=root,file=classic.img,format=qcow2,l2-cache-size=4M -usb -netdev tap,id=mynet0,ifname=tap0,script=no,downscript=no -device rtl8139,netdev=mynet0 -rtc base=localtime -L ndrv -prom-env resolutions=640x480,800x600,1024x768,1152x864,1280x800,1440x900,1920x1080 -device usb-tablet

  Incidentally, if you want to build the USB Tablet app yourself, I was able to do so by downloading the project, resource and source file, converting the .r and .c files to Mac line endings, and opening the project in CodeWarrior 7 on my MDD G4.

• Mac OS 9 will now boot up, and once USB Tablet is run, your mouse will suddenly switch to tablet mode. No more mouse grabbing needed. Nice!

Since I have GNOME set to respond to some muscle-memory key sequences like Command-Q (to close the window), I created an appmodmap bit for QEMU so that Command-Q would be passed to the emulated Mac and only Ctrl-Command-Q would actually quit QEMU. A command like gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings close "['<Ctrl><Super>Q']" & should do it too.

The next thing to do is get networking operational, because this is how we'll share files. Regular EtherTalk doesn't work but AFP-over-TCP does and Netatalk supports it. (You could of course install something like DAVE and use samba, but Mac OS 9 has AFP-over-TCP support built in and Netatalk preserves resource forks.)

• Configure your network within Mac OS 9 from the TCP/IP control panel. As we have it configured here it should be sufficient to just get an address over DHCP (from QEMU).

• Set up Netatalk. Depending on how it's built you may or may not get any of the authentication options to work; mine didn't with the Fedora package even though the emulated Mac could talk to my usual Sawtooth G4 fileserver with a password. I eventually just set up guest access to a single interchange folder that runs as me, because all of my office systems including the T2 are on an independent non-routable network (if you don't have such a setup, consider binding it to an internal interface only). /usr/local/etc/afp.conf thus looks like this, assuming your username is billg:

  [Global]
  ; Global server settings
      vol preset = my default values
      afp interfaces = enP4p1s0f0
      uam list = uams_guest.so
      guest account = billg
  
  [my default values]
      appledouble = ea
      ea = samba
  
  [Homes]
      basedir regex = /home
  
  [HFS Work Area]
      path = /home/billg/HFS

  This way some malicious Mac program (or more likely me fatfingering something) can't do anything more than trash the HFS folder from QEMU. enP4p1s0f0 is the NIC on the local network (from ip addr).

• Go to the Chooser. Click AppleShare (notice no servers appear, even if you set AppleTalk to Ethernet) and then the Server IP Address button, and enter your host machine's local address. If you used my example above, connect as guest and you'll get offered a drive called "HFS Work Area." Open that and you will now have file sharing operational.

• Finally, let's make it automatically mount. Since it's connected as a guest we need not preserve credentials because there are none to preserve (you could, if you wanted to, in the Mac OS 9 keychain). Make an alias of the network mount and drop it into the Servers folder in your emulated Mac's system folder. Shut down the emulated Mac and restart QEMU; the drive should automount, allowing you to instantly interchange files back and forth.

One more nice thing, which is optional, is to sleep the emulation when not in use. Sleeping from the Finder (i.e., Special, Sleep) doesn't work because the "lid is not closed" [sic], so to do this go to QEMU's Machine menu and check Pause. This does have a couple side effects, namely that after a few minutes the AppleTalk connection will be severed and the time will be wrong, since the clock doesn't resync. To reconnect the AppleTalk connection go to the Apple Menu, Recent Servers and select it; it will reopen.

The time is a little trickier. Mac OS 9 will talk to NTP servers, but it doesn't sync on demand, thus the Network Time CDEV we offered on the Essentials ISO. Not only will this let you fix the time right away (Apple Menu, Control Panels, Network Time and click Set Time) but you can also adjust for post-2002 daylight savings in your locale by defining a new, corrected timezone.

Once we figure out the issues with split-hack and KVM-PR, we should be able to get a dramatic speed boost on OpenPOWER systems. But even as it is, the software runs well and my sizeable investment in classic Mac applications is preserved. Sure, you could do this on a PC or a modern Mac, but I'd rather do it on what every Power Mac wants to be when it grows up (and when virtualization is working should be even better).

Raptor suspends shipments due to COVID-19

UPDATE from Tim Pearson: "It looks like with the latest guidance released from the state we can in fact continue to operate mostly normally. Bundles/mainboards/etc. will continue to ship from stock, but any unusual options on built systems or built systems that require parts depleted from stock would have a TBD ship date until the parts can be brought into stock." Good news! Buy that Blackbird bundle after all!

Just in case you were planning on that Blackbird: because of Illinois' "shelter-in-place" order due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Raptor is announcing they are unable to ship. Existing orders (like my order for a second dual-8 Talos II) cannot be refunded or cancelled currently, not that I plan to, but don't make the order unless you are prepared to wait. In addition, tickets and phone support are also suspended, though their IT hosting services and community support are unaffected.

Still, if you have the money to spare, we don't want these folks to go under. Maybe spin up a VM to play with.

Combat coronavirus. Buy a Blackbird.

There hasn't been a lot of content on Talospace lately because of how exponentially busier my particular dayjob has gotten and bluntly I'll just say the Chinese government has a lot to answer for the way they've handled all of this. I'm not going to belabour the obvious impact on COVID-19 on health, but it's also similarly roiling financial markets and a lot of businesses are going to fail the longer this goes on as supply chains get perturbed, especially for imported components.

Any contraction, but in particular one that has a high probability of being prolonged, is bad for niche computing markets like ours. Global contractions like the one that's hitting and the persistent one that's certain to follow disproportionately affect big-ticket items as people hold onto cash. (A finance colleague of mine is convinced there's about to be a liquidity crunch, and he makes a compelling argument I won't repeat here.) Unfortunately, largely because our sorts of systems lack various economies of scale, these are the systems most likely to die off if companies like Raptor go under because they're the ones much fewer people are buying.

This should not be interpreted as me telegraphing some belief that Raptor is financially unsound (they're a private company anyhow; I have no idea what their balance sheet looks like), but I'm rather invested in OpenPOWER and I wouldn't want it to be a casualty of the economic hit we're likely to take until a COVID-19 vaccine or effective treatment exists. And right now Raptor are the ones actually shipping workstations and I want that to continue.

I myself have already pulled the trigger on a second Talos II, upgrading to a dual-8 POWER9 DD2.3 system instead of the dual-4 DD2.2 I have now. I'll combine the RAM and cards, leaving me with a spare board, CPUs and chassis which can be a source for parts or to replace my aging POWER6 frontline server when it reaches my planned end of service period in a few years. I'm looking forward to it arriving, and I'm sure the extra few thousand would be appreciated by the back office to keep folks on the payroll getting systems configured and shipped.

If you're dithering over whether you want to pick up that Blackbird and you've got the cash or plastic on hand, consider just going ahead and doing it. Even just consider picking up a board and CPU if you need to save a little extra. Support the small businesses that support us. If this whole thing goes like we worry it's gonna, we're all going to be spending a lot more time at home anyway, so you might as well do it with a computer you can trust.

Firefox 74 on POWER

So far another uneventful release on ppc64le; I'm typing this blog post in Fx74. Most of what's new in this release is under the hood, and there are no OpenPOWER specific changes (I need to sit down with some of my other VMX/VSX patches and prep them for upstream). The working debug and optimized .mozconfigs are unchanged from Firefox 67.