I have an iMac G4, and I think it would be interesting to use it with Haiku, but I know the port is incomplete so I’d like to ask:
What’s the current status of the port?
What’s missing, or better asked, what’s done and what’s working?
What should be prioritized to get a booting system?
Why was the bootloader on a different disc?
And could someone recommend useful resources to this development?
Any and all answers would be greatly appreciated!
From my understanding - PowerPC doesn’t work. There is no bootable version. There may be a way to get it to boot to the boot screen, but it doesn’t have a bootable version that is able to boot to the desktop.
Try the search feature of the forum. For example, this has been discussed fairly recently here Compiling haikuports.cross for PPC.
The port doesn’t work, very much bitrotten. As for resources, low-level skills of where software meets hardware is needed is my guess.
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There are various problems, but I think the main one will be writing drivers for various Apple custom hardware. If I remember correctly from work on the Mac Mini, the PCI bus needs a driver, and after that, hopefully other stuff is connected to PCI and can use the usual drivers.
I don’t think the bootloader is necessarily on a different disc? As far as I know it is possible to build a complete bootable CD with the bootloader and rootfs on it. The only difference is you don’t use the “anyboot” target as on x86, but the “cd” or “iso” target (I forgot how it is called).
In early stages it may be easier to test using network booting if you can set this up: build the software on another machine, and boot it using network boot from openfirmware and the remote disk server. This avoids having to copy the built image to bootable media everytime.
Other than that, I have not much to say: try building it, see where it fails, study the logs, fix the problem, repeat until you get to the desktop!
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Hello,
I already had a look at the PPC port of Haiku. The bootstrap version kind of builds, however the bootloader currently both has problems detecting a hard disk partition (I used a CD-RW, which was detected) and loading the kernel (Yn0ga has some
patches which make it get further). QEMU’s openfirmware (OpenBIOS) also has some quirks and the CPU emulation hangs on VSIDs < 1024 iirc. (On real hardware I had the opposite problem, it exited to OFW on VSIDs >= 1024, though that could
be a mistake on my part).
Also, currently the bootloader uses Openfirmware extensively which is fine on NewWorld PPC systems
but would be difficult on OldWorld systems (Apple thought that it would be a great idea to not be able to access APMs and HFS but only iso9660 and FAT on Openfirmware < 2.4, which is for example used in the G3 Wallstreet and G3 beige systems)
I do however want to spend some more time on the powerpc port when I have some more spare time as I also have multiple PowerPC systems which should theoretically be able to run Haiku.
but as far as I understand, it would be difficult would be having something the size of Haikuports for even more architectures (not just for powerpc), is that correct?
It’s not just that you need a build server
(If that would really be the only thing, I might be able
to offer to run one, though the newest consumer PPC hardware is almost 20+ years old and compiling stuff would thus be quite slow), but also mirroring, which would be quite expensive from what I’ve heard and wonder if that would even be fesable. Without mirrors though the ports wouldn’t be too usable as a daily driver, as at least on most Apple PowerPC systems compiling a modern linux kernel can take over 8 hours and programs like inkscape and gimp certainly
take longer.
I should definetly try to set that up, currently I just copy boot_loader_openfirmware over to a PowerPC system and create a BFS formatted CD-RW, which is quite slow.
regards,
zeldakatze
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I don’t see why, the server can host more packages.
There are or were some difficulties with running the haikuports build servers (due to using cloud infrastructure that is a lot more efficient when storing files in S3 or similar things instead of just a plain old NFS or other shared volume) but I think this has been resolved and then new solution will be deployed soon if it isn’t already.
Anyway, this is only useful after the OS itself is up and running.
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