CHRP support gone from Linux kernel
There weren't that many Common Hardware Reference Platform PowerPC systems anyway, but if you have one of them (notably systems like IBM's RS/6000 7046 Model B50, the Total Impact briQ, Motorola PowerStacks or the PegasosPPC or Pegasos II from Genesi), your days are numbered as CHRP support will be removed from the next Linux kernel release. CHRP never got much market traction; Apple, then the largest seller of PowerPC machines, only partially supported it (Old World Macs are sui generis and New World Macs are a combination of CHRP and PReP), and as a result Linux support for Power Macs — at least what remains — never completely depended on it.
At least for the Genesi machines, however, you have better and more supported options in MorphOS and AmigaOS 4, and while Power Macs should still work, they're (IMHO) more usefully served by one of the BSDs. For the real oddball machines, though, if you were running a bleeding-edge kernel this is the end of the line — unless you'd like to step in and maintain it.
The Pegasos was my introduction to PPC. I wanted to mess around with a non-x86, and I didn't want to just get a Mac, and IBM was esoteric and probably out of my price range (I didn't have experience with AIX, lucky me).
ReplyDeleteThe board I got (and still have) had a North Bridge on it with a TON of bugs. My particular motherboard had already been patched with a custom BGA interposer board that had three patches for bad behavior from the NB. It turns out that even with those three hardware patches, it still suffered from DMA failing if it needed to write past 256MiB of RAM. So, it came with an 128MiB ECC PC133, and I had purchased a 1GiB ECC PC133 stick, so I was stuck with a stable system with half the RAM it could use, or a system that crashed if it went above 256MiB.
Mine had the default CPU card, an IBM 750GX (G3), and it was so snappy compared to my x86 and original Athlon64 builds. Loved that about it, didn't really get into the Amiga-update OS, but Gentoo ran great on it.
I decided to throw money at it, and bought an iBook G4 (800MHz, 256MiB RAM, 60GB HDD), and I loved that thing, until the solder joints failed on its "logic board". After that Power Mac G5, then Blackbird. I feel like POWER has been out of the limelight for so long that we're really stepping up the regressions at this point. I still want OpenPOWER to come save the day.
I contacted Michael Ellerman, and let him know that I have several B50s (along with other IBM power boxes and multiple Macs) that I use for retro computing. He indicated he had also been contacted by another end user.
ReplyDeleteHe’d floated the Changes as an RFC, and now will not go ahead.
Thanks for the heads up!
Al Dunsmuir
Excellent news!
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