I’m very new to powerpc, having only picked up my G5 two days ago and
never having used any powerpc computer before. But it seems like I
arrived at about the right time. I saw the discussion of a 2021-04-16
installer image on this list, so I burned it to CD, booted it,
installed and booted straight into the new OS. Given the lack of
information about this port on the main Debian site, I had thought
things might be more difficult. So while I’m here, I should take the opportunity to thank the Debian powerpc community and in particular the maintainer Adrian Glaubitz.

Having seen firefox packages in the repository, I was a little
disappointed (although not surprised) to find they don’t run. The
‘Illegal instruction’ error I get looks similar to this: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/02/msg00025.html so not a
new problem it seems. Maybe I’ll look at the browsers based the old
firefox codebase (https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/02/msg00081.html).

james@PowerMac-G5:~$ firefox
Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: No
visuals found (t=4.23128) [GFX1-]: glxtest: No visuals found Crash
Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: No visuals
found (t=4.23128) |[1][GFX1]: Unknown image format 1 (t=11.8668)
[GFX1]: Unknown image format 1 Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: No visuals found (t=4.23128) |[1][GFX1]: Unknown
image format 1 (t=11.8668) |[2][GFX1]: Unknown image format 1
(t=11.9111) [GFX1]: Unknown image format 1 Exiting due to channel
error. Illegal instruction

I’ve noticed a strange problem with the ATI Radeon 9600 (RV350) GPU. It
seems that by default the ‘radeon’ driver is used (as expected), but
the performance is very poor. Windows take time to draw, menus are slow
and there’s a noticeable delay between typing and letters appearing.
Simple programs like the terminal are almost unusable because of the
large delay using the scroll bar. Looking through the kernel messages I
noticed “[drm] Forcing AGP to PCI mode”. Maybe this is related? The
problem goes away and everything works smoothly if I instruct Xorg to
use the “fbdev” driver instead.

Looking more closely at this list, I see this problem has been reported
before: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2019/12/msg00027.html.
In any case it seems that AGP was disabled some time last year: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-AGP-GART-Disabling-Patch
and so AGP will now always use PCI mode. In the same message it’s
mentioned that the problem is noticeable with firefox. Which implies it
was working at that time?

I had thought about installing an older kernel to see if this could be configured to not use PCI mode. I didn’t get as far as that though
because I ran into a problem where the hfs partition for grub was not
clean. This caused it to be mounted read only and prevented a kernel installation from working (could not update the read-only grub.cfg).
I’m unable to run fsck.hfs to fix this as the package hfsprogs does not
exist (not found here: https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=all&arch=ppc64&searchon=names&keywords=hfsprogs).
Did the name change? I see this package was recently fixed: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=919532#32 & https://launchpad.net/debian/+source/hfsprogs/540.1.linux3-1. Hopefully
this package can easily be added.

I’ve asked quite a few questions here and I appreciate there’s probably
no easy answer for most of them. Hopefully the tip about using fbdev to
work around the slow radeon driver is of use to others at least. Could
this be made the default?
--
Regards,
James

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Hello James,

On 24 Apr 2021, at 22:32, James Madgwick wrote:

james@PowerMac-G5:~$ firefox
Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: No
visuals found (t=4.23128) [GFX1-]: glxtest: No visuals found Crash
Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: No visuals
found (t=4.23128) |[1][GFX1]: Unknown image format 1 (t=11.8668)
[GFX1]: Unknown image format 1 Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: No visuals found (t=4.23128) |[1][GFX1]: Unknown
image format 1 (t=11.8668) |[2][GFX1]: Unknown image format 1
(t=11.9111) [GFX1]: Unknown image format 1 Exiting due to channel
error. Illegal instruction

I don’t know about the other issues, but there is a known issue about
Firefox and Thunderbird[1] which was fixed by Adrian and should be
delivered by sid soon.

As long you might want to use ArcticFox from Riccardo Mottola which you
can retrieve using the powerprogess repo like so (from root, if you have
sudo installed):

```
sh -c "echo 'deb http://repo.powerprogress.org/debian sid main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
wget -O - https://repo.powerprogress.org/debian/conf/public.gpg.key|sudo
-s apt-key add
apt-get update

apt-get -y install arcticfox
```

Johannes



[1] https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D105354
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/xhtml; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<div style="font-family:sans-serif"><div style="white-space:normal">
<p dir="auto">Hello James,</p>

<p dir="auto">On 24 Apr 2021, at 22:32, James Madgwick wrote:</p>

<blockquote style="border-left:2px solid #777; color:#777; margin:0 0 5px; padding-left:5px">
<p dir="auto">james@PowerMac-G5:~$ firefox<br>
Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: No<br>
visuals found (t=4.23128) [GFX1-]: glxtest: No visuals found Crash<br> Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: No visuals<br>
found (t=4.23128) |[1][GFX1]: Unknown image format 1 (t=11.8668)<br>
[GFX1]: Unknown image format 1 Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError:<br> |[0][GFX1-]: glxtest: No visuals found (t=4.23128) |[1][GFX1]: Unknown<br> image format 1 (t=11.8668) |[2][GFX1]: Unknown image format 1<br>
(t=11.9111) [GFX1]: Unknown image format 1 Exiting due to channel<br>
error. Illegal instruction</p>
</blockquote>

<p dir="auto">I don’t know about the other issues, but there is a known issue about Firefox and Thunderbird[1] which was fixed by Adrian and should be delivered by sid soon.</p>

<p dir="auto">As long you might want to use ArcticFox from Riccardo Mottola which you can retrieve using the powerprogess repo like so (from root, if you have sudo installed):</p>

<pre style="background-color:#F7F7F7; border-radius:5px 5px 5px 5px; margin-left:15px; margin-right:15px; max-width:90vw; overflow-x:auto; padding:5px" bgcolor="#F7F7F7"><code style="background-color:#F7F7F7; border-radius:3px; margin:0; padding:0"
bgcolor="#F7F7F7">sh -c "echo 'deb http://repo.powerprogress.org/debian sid main' &gt;&gt; /etc/apt/sources.list"
wget -O - https://repo.powerprogress.org/debian/conf/public.gpg.key|sudo -s apt-key add
apt-get update

apt-get -y install arcticfox
</code></pre>

<p dir="auto">Johannes</p>

<p dir="auto">[1] <a href="https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D105354" style="color:#3983C4">https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D105354</a></p>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

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On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 11:17:28 +0200
Johannes Brakensiek <ml@codingpastor.de> wrote:

I don’t know about the other issues, but there is a known issue about Firefox and Thunderbird[1] which was fixed by Adrian and should be
delivered by sid soon.

As long you might want to use ArcticFox from Riccardo Mottola which
you can retrieve using the powerprogess repo like so (from root, if
you have sudo installed):

Thanks. I've set up up that repository and I'm now happily using
ArcticFox. As an aside, I had also tried Konqueror - it has the same
problem as firefox. Epiphany did work but it was extremely slow, taking
minutes to load simple pages and the colors were all wrong.

I've had a closer look into the poor performing graphics and it
seems this the norm. "Forcing AGP to PCI mode" seems to have
always been the default for many years on powerpc: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/x-org-drm/1178481-agp-graphics-card-support-proposed-for-removal-from-linux-radeon-nvidia-drivers/page9#post1209079
and so it's simply a case of poorly drivers. I tried installing the non-
free amd firmware (firmware-amd-graphics) but it made no difference.
Trying to enable glamor or DRI3 resulted in Xorg crashing. When using
fbdev I get only 100FPS in glxgears, compared to close to 1000 with
radeon, but everything else is very slow with radeon so it's not
otherwise usable. Ultimately I don't think being forced to use fbdev
really matters, these old GPUs have nothing to offer beyond 3D
acceleration - which has little application on this system in 2021. It
would however be interesting to see if this radeon slowness is
replicated on x86.

I've also now created a new problem for myself. My system has two disks,
one with MacOS and now one with Debian. I had disconnected the MacOS
disk while I installed Debian. After completing the installation, the G5
would boot into Debian only if the Mac disk was unplugged. My mistake
was to then go into the startup disk utility on MacOS and see if I
could make Debian the startup disk. This didn't work and with the Mac
disk unplugged I now get the flashing "?" folder (I can still boot
manually from OpenFirmware). I guess MacOS has erased an nvram variable
set by the Debian installer? Is there an easy way to reproduce what the installer did and get Debian booting automatically again?

--
Regards,
James

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On 25 Apr 2021, at 18:01, James Madgwick wrote:

Ultimately I don't think being forced to use fbdev
really matters, these old GPUs have nothing to offer beyond 3D
acceleration - which has little application on this system in 2021. It
would however be interesting to see if this radeon slowness is
replicated on x86.

I’m using a Radeon HD 6570 now in a PowerMac11,2 and it works quite
well - it is as fast as I’d expect it to be from a machine of this
age. The PowerMac11,2 already has got PCIe (1.00) of course, so I
don’t know if it is specific to your machine’s architecture.

I’m experiencing the same issues with epiphany-browser as well though
(it’s quite fast, but colors are not ok), it does not work using
Wayland at all (only grey noise for the whole window). So this seems to
be specific to the ppc(64?) architecture.

I suppose the issues I’m experiencing (if not BigEndian errors) might
derive from the same source as the issues mentioned over there:

„X kinda works with the wsfb driver. Colours are all wrong because for
some reason the OF calls for colour map control don't work. Mine's got
a Radeon X1950, which the radeon driver of course supports, but for
some reason expects to find an x86 BIOS ROM with, which of course
doesn't exist on a mac. May or may not be easy to fix.“[1]

But I did not debug those yet.

I've also now created a new problem for myself. My system has two
disks,
one with MacOS and now one with Debian. I had disconnected the MacOS
disk while I installed Debian. After completing the installation, the
G5
would boot into Debian only if the Mac disk was unplugged. My mistake
was to then go into the startup disk utility on MacOS and see if I
could make Debian the startup disk. This didn't work and with the Mac
disk unplugged I now get the flashing "?" folder (I can still boot
manually from OpenFirmware). I guess MacOS has erased an nvram
variable
set by the Debian installer? Is there an easy way to reproduce what
the
installer did and get Debian booting automatically again?

You probably need to boot the install CD/image, mount your Debian root
and boot partitions, chroot into it and reinstall grub.[2] The device
IDs probably have changed by inserting the new drive. So, yes, it would
have been better to do the install with all disks inserted, I think.

Good luck
Johannes

[1] https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-macppc/2017/10/01/msg002461.html
[2] Information about grub on PowerPC: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB_on_Open_Firmware_(PowerPC)

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On 4/24/21 10:32 PM, James Madgwick wrote:

Having seen firefox packages in the repository, I was a little
disappointed (although not surprised) to find they don’t run. The ‘Illegal instruction’ error I get looks similar to this: https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/02/msg00025.html so not a
new problem it seems. Maybe I’ll look at the browsers based the old
firefox codebase (https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2017/02/msg00081.html).

Please wait until my fix for NSS has landed in Debian unstable so that the SIGILL issue has been fixed. It doesn't really make much sense to try to
test Firefox before that.

I’m unable to run fsck.hfs to fix this as the package hfsprogs does not exist (not found here: https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=all&arch=ppc64&searchon=names&keywords=hfsprogs).
Did the name change? I see this package was recently fixed: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=919532#32 & https://launchpad.net/debian/+source/hfsprogs/540.1.linux3-1. Hopefully
this package can easily be added.

The hfsprogs package had to be moved to non-free because Apple's APSL license is
not considered DFSG-compliant [1] which is currently not available in Debian Ports
as Debian Ports has the packages of the "main" section only.

I have asked the Debian Ports FTP admins already to add "contrib" and "non-free"
for Debian Ports but so far that hasn't happened yet.

Adrian

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=666707

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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Hello James,

On 25/04/2021 18:01, James Madgwick wrote:

On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 11:17:28 +0200
Johannes Brakensiek <ml@codingpastor.de> wrote:

Thanks. I've set up up that repository and I'm now happily using
ArcticFox. As an aside, I had also tried Konqueror - it has the same
problem as firefox. Epiphany did work but it was extremely slow, taking minutes to load simple pages and the colors were all wrong.

Nice to know that the ArcticFox efforts are of use a lot of single-man
effort is going into it. It will need mmore help, especially with people
ore expert of gecko and firefox, but for now it churns along. The
obsolete but also update browser. Recent news are import of more
AltiVec/VMX code from TenFourFox and available for everybody! But I
don't think the PowerProgressCommunity package is recent enough.

I've had a closer look into the poor performing graphics and it
seems this the norm. "Forcing AGP to PCI mode" seems to have
always been the default for many years on powerpc: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/x-org-drm/1178481-agp-graphics-card-support-proposed-for-removal-from-linux-radeon-nvidia-drivers/page9#post1209079
and so it's simply a case of poorly drivers. I tried installing the non-
free amd firmware (firmware-amd-graphics) but it made no difference.
Trying to enable glamor or DRI3 resulted in Xorg crashing. When using
fbdev I get only 100FPS in glxgears, compared to close to 1000 with
radeon, but everything else is very slow with radeon so it's not
otherwise usable. Ultimately I don't think being forced to use fbdev
really matters, these old GPUs have nothing to offer beyond 3D
acceleration - which has little application on this system in 2021. It
would however be interesting to see if this radeon slowness is
replicated on x86.

I don't know which applications do you use, but for me things are not as
bad. I have both a PowerBook G4 and an iMac G5 now running Debian with
both ATI Radeon and things are quite nice. Moving windows along,
scrolling in most application is quite acceptable. I use GNUstep
(obviously) and GWorkspace, Ink, Graphos run quite well, no noticeable
lag. Xterm is blazingly fast, Terminal.app is less, but that's the code,
still usable though. So something is not working at your place.

Radeon drivers are still decent (maybe the only ones along with Intel)
on Intel.


I do have some more serious issues with WebGL on PowerPC with Radeon. O
test using ArcticFox

- on the iMac G5 some of the examples show completely wrong textures and
absurd colors

- on the PowerBook G4 similar issues, but not the same artifacts

- on the iBook G4 (still with Radeon and very similar to the PowerBook
G4) WebGl fails to initialize.


Graphics is accelerated, so with wrong textures but one can see that it
is working!

All systems have AMD firmware installed, I don't understand the iBook issue.

So on your system, which is better than mines, things must be more than
usable!


Riccardo

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On 4/28/21 12:54 AM, Riccardo Mottola wrote:

Thanks. I've set up up that repository and I'm now happily using
ArcticFox. As an aside, I had also tried Konqueror - it has the same
problem as firefox. Epiphany did work but it was extremely slow, taking
minutes to load simple pages and the colors were all wrong.

Nice to know that the ArcticFox efforts are of use a lot of single-man effort is going into it. It will need mmore help, especially with people ore expert of
gecko and firefox, but for now it churns along.

FWIW, Firefox for 32-bit PowerPC is going to return in the foreseeable future, there have been some improvements in various places and I think we should be able to build Firefox again in the near future on 32-bit PowerPC.

Adrian

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

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On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 19:28:53 +0200
"Johannes Brakensiek" <letterus@codingpastor.de> wrote:

I’m using a Radeon HD 6570 now in a PowerMac11,2 and it works quite
well - it is as fast as I’d expect it to be from a machine of this
age. The PowerMac11,2 already has got PCIe (1.00) of course, so I
don’t know if it is specific to your machine’s architecture.

I imagine the PCIe bus is a big advantage as it won't have suffered the
same code rot that AGP has. I don't get the impression that Linux
support for AGP was ever totally working. The HD 6570 has good support
in 'radeon' which has been improved even recently. Linux supports this generation of GPUs far better than any other OS.

I've got a PCI ATI GPU somewhere around; I might try that and see if
the problems go away. If they do it will confirm the issue as specific
to AGP cards.

You probably need to boot the install CD/image, mount your Debian
root and boot partitions, chroot into it and reinstall grub.[2] The
device IDs probably have changed by inserting the new drive. So, yes,
it would have been better to do the install with all disks inserted,
I think.

I've since installed a new SSD (Kingston A400) and I was able to
install MacOS followed by Debian. Both show in the OF boot picker and
the system automatically boots into Debian. I'm not sure why the boot
picker option was lost previously. Probably the interference by MacOS,
or a flat PRAM battery.

On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 20:49:47 +0200
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

Please wait until my fix for NSS has landed in Debian unstable so
that the SIGILL issue has been fixed. It doesn't really make much
sense to try to test Firefox before that.

The hfsprogs package had to be moved to non-free because Apple's APSL
license is not considered DFSG-compliant [1] which is currently not
available in Debian Ports as Debian Ports has the packages of the
"main" section only.

I have asked the Debian Ports FTP admins already to add "contrib" and "non-free" for Debian Ports but so far that hasn't happened yet.

I'll wait for these fixes to land and for the Ports repo to be updated.
I'll try and remember to check back in a few months time, hopefully the
changes will have propagated by then.

On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 00:54:39 +0200
Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:

I don't know which applications do you use, but for me things are not
as bad. I have both a PowerBook G4 and an iMac G5 now running Debian
with both ATI Radeon and things are quite nice. Moving windows along, scrolling in most application is quite acceptable. I use GNUstep
(obviously) and GWorkspace, Ink, Graphos run quite well, no
noticeable lag. Xterm is blazingly fast, Terminal.app is less, but
that's the code, still usable though. So something is not working at
your place.

Graphics is accelerated, so with wrong textures but one can see that
it is working!

So on your system, which is better than mines, things must be more
than usable!

I've just tried again, this time using mwm instead of MATE. Performance
is certainly better with this minimal window manager. Xterm is
responsive and usable. GTK apps are not perfect but are better than
with MATE. It would seem that Xorg simply suffers poor performance when
using 'radeon'. When using a lightweight wm this is simply less
noticeable, though performance is still better using software rendering.

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