I’m an enthusiast and collector of vintage computers, particularly PowerPC Macs. I own and actively use:
a PowerMac G5 Dual 2GHz (4GB RAM)
an iBook G3 (800MHz, 640MB RAM)
and even a Performa 5400 for the real retro feel
I’m currently running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 on the iBook, and Sorbet Leopard 1.5.9 on the G5. I’ve also tried Linux on both systems — MintPPC, Fienix, Lubuntu 16.04, and Debian Sid — but performance is often underwhelming (especially on the G3), and buggy or unstable even on the G5, despite its decent specs.
I think Haiku could be the perfect modern lightweight OS for these machines: fast, responsive, and clean — just like BeOS was. I’m very interested in testing any available builds of Haiku for PowerPC, even if they’re experimental or outdated.
I understand that PowerPC support has been inactive for a while, but if anyone is considering reviving it — or needs someone to test bootloaders, images, or early builds — I’m happy to help and provide feedback, logs, etc.
I have a Wii U I want to run Haiku on, with older PowerPC computers it can often be too little RAM to run Haiku unfortunately. It depends on the machine you want to run it on.
Some other OS may be a better choice for many PowerPC machines. (Maybe stuff like ArOS, but no clue : )
You raise a good point about RAM limitations on older hardware, but fortunately that’s not an issue in my case. My PowerMac G5 has 4GB of RAM, and even the iBook G3 is maxed out for its era. Upgrading RAM in PowerPC Macs is often cheap and easy these days, so many of these machines can be brought to very usable configurations.
As a fun side note, just last month I managed to install Haiku on a ThinkPad 600 with only 288MB of RAM — and it worked surprisingly well! That experience gave me even more confidence that Haiku would run just fine on many PowerPC Macs, especially the G4 and G5 systems which are well above the minimum requirements.
Also worth mentioning: until just a few years ago, PowerPC machines (especially G5s) were still in daily use in public offices here in Italy. In fact, my G5 came from one of those institutions. It’s really a shame to see all this reliable hardware getting discarded simply because no modern OS is available for it anymore.
As for exotic platforms — sure, running Haiku on a Wii U sounds like an adventure! But if someone’s looking for truly exotic, they might as well try getting Windows NT on it
That said, I’d still love to hear if there have been any internal discussions about possibly reviving the PowerPC port, or at least getting it to a bootable state again on modern toolchains. I’d be happy to help with testing or debugging early builds.
Last autumn me and @Yn0ga played a bit with the PowerPC port and we got the boot loader to start the kernel. I have been busy with other things and I guess Yn0ga has been too, but I could try to see if I can get it to start the kernel with latest changes. In the kernel initialisation there would be at least some work on virtual memory to get it to boot further.
My 2 PowerPC systems are single threaded. The G4 Mac Mini runs MorphOS well on 1 Gig of RAM and my MicroA1 (Teron Mini morherboard) has 256 Megs and running AmigaOS 4.1FE is fit for the trash heap with its Radeon 7000 and 32 Meg video RAM. Amigas without maximum graphics acceleration are obsolete to the Nth power unless you just want to show off retro skill.
Without a dual CPU motherboard, what would be the point of BeOS, let alone Haiku?
Thanks a lot for the update, @ilzu — that’s exciting news!
It’s really encouraging to hear that you and @Yn0ga got the bootloader and kernel to start last autumn. If you ever get the chance to try booting the kernel again with the latest changes, I’d be more than happy to test it.
I can try running it both on my PowerMac G5 (dual 2GHz, 4GB RAM) and on my iBook G3, so you could get feedback from two very different PowerPC setups — one high-end dual CPU system and one lower-end single CPU laptop.
Even a partially working kernel would be super interesting to experiment with. If there’s a repo or branch where the current PowerPC work is being done, feel free to point me to it — or if you’re able to share a test ISO or image, I’d be glad to try booting it and report back.
Thanks again for looking into this, it really means a lot for those of us who still love and use PowerPC machines regularly.
Hi @SamuraiCrow — I understand your point, but I’d say it really depends on the system and the use case.
Right now, I’m actually testing the latest release of Chimera Linux on my iBook G3. It’s running a Linux 6.x kernel and, while performance isn’t exactly mind-blowing, it does boot and it’s usable for lightweight tasks. And that alone is quite impressive for such old hardware.
That’s why I believe there’s still value in trying to bring Haiku back to PowerPC — especially for machines like the G4 and G5, which still have decent specs and can offer a much better user experience than many assume.
Also, I do have a dual CPU PowerMac G5, and I’d be more than happy to test anything that comes out of a Haiku PPC revival.
hello,
I’m also trying to work on powerpc support. I already wanted to work on it half a year ago, however I had some other (especially university stuff) that got in the way.
Currently, the bootstrap build somehow fails for me on texinfo_bootstrap when linking. I’ll have a look at it this week.
That thing will probably never run run Haiku. I happen to have one aswell and those things aren’t even fast enough for classic mac os, ignoring the fact that they don’t have openfirmware at all.
The iBook should be definetly capable of running haiku if the port is successful, I’ve used 32 bit haiku productively for studying with just 512mb of ram. These machines could also profit from haiku not using 3D acceleration in that many places, as their gpu would not support opengl 2.0 which blocks many newer GTK applications which use hardware acceleration under debian unstable.
Iirc (from the debian-powerpc mailing list) there is a cpu bug with caching and locking when using multiple cores. There was a suggested patch to (I believe) gcc which would work around it, however that would’ve caused a noticable performance penalty for all other powerpc systems, so the Wii-U debian port only uses one core.
The 5400 is not an old world machine but a NuBus-System, which is more similar to the 68k systems, i.e. it does not have openfirmware at all and to boot a system, you’d need to use a mac os based bootloader. Old world machines, like the PowerBook G3 could be supported, as they both have enough resources and a somewhat working Openfirmware implementation. But currently the port only targets new world machines, as they don’t have as many quirks (on the PB G3 Wallstreet, openfirmware can only read fat, mbr and iso9660 systems, which makes booting of the hard drive difficult.)
Thanks so much @ilzu and @zeldakatze — it’s really exciting to see this interest around Haiku on PowerPC!
Just a quick note: the Performa 5400 isn’t NuBus — it’s based on the Alchemy architecture with Open Firmware. It’s definitely not a realistic target for Haiku (mine has just 136MB of RAM), but I’ve run Debian 8 with IceWM on it, just for fun.
That said, I fully agree that the real focus should be on machines from the G3 generation onwards — especially G4 and G5, which are still very capable.
What really matters is that there’s already a small group of us interested and willing to test, share results, and contribute. That’s a great start — and I’m very happy to be part of it. I’m ready to test anything on both my iBook G3 and PowerMac G5.
Just a quick update from my side:
Yesterday I tested Adélie Linux beta 6 (live CD) on my iBook G3 — and to my surprise, it runs incredibly well!
Boots fast, system is responsive, and overall performance is very solid for such an old machine.
What’s more, it was running XFCE — which isn’t even the lightest desktop environment out there.
That’s why I’m convinced Haiku could absolutely shine on this kind of hardware. If Adélie can offer that level of performance with XFCE, Haiku — with its much lighter architecture — could likely do even better.
I have piles of powerpc macs from the 603 to the G5 laying around here, desktop and notebook form factor a plenty, even some dual CPU. I have been waiting for a powerpc port with anticipation.
I hit a compilation (not linking) problem trying it yesterday on arm64. I tried to update to texinfo 7 but ran into a linking problem while compiling some texinfo code for the host system.
Maybe that updated recipe will work better for you? I pushed it on Github. I appreciate help on solving that problem I hit (or maybe other people will not run into it).
I have also updated the bootstrapping page in the Haiku internals documentation. I would like ot have a list of succesful bootstraps and maybe a list of failed ones, including:
target architecture
host architecture
host OS distribution and version
hrev, btrev (buildtools version), sha1 of haikuports, haikuports.cross and haikuporter, and any patches applied
shell used to run the commands (somehow this makes a difference for me, when using mksh as my shell, the bootstrap fails, but with bash it works fine)
outcome: success or error message and at which stage it happened
Hopefully this can help provide better guidance on what environments are supported, and what’s broken in the other cases.
The memory requirement for current nightlies are down quite a bit, so that may work. It will not be enough RAM to be really useful for anything, but maybe you can get to the Desktop (very slowly).
Thanks everyone — it’s great to see this coming together!
@ilzu I’ll keep an eye on the repo and I’m happy to test any builds on my G3 and G5. I can share logs and feedback as needed.
@Wildman nice to know there are more testers ready — maybe we can keep results in one place to track progress.
@PulkoMandy thanks for the bootstrap notes — I’ll use bash as suggested. I’m mainly focused on G3/G5, but I’ll keep the Performa around for fun.
I have very little experience with building large projects like Haiku (just tried a few small things under Linux in the past), but I’d still love to help however I can — especially with testing and reporting results if needed.
Its amazing seeing that PowerPC is suddenly gaining attention again in the community (even though I don’t come from the era of PowerPC)! I thought that the PowerPC port has been dormant. I hope to see how talented members can revive legacy hardware to be satisfying modern daily use and extend their lifespan! By installing Haiku on PowerPC Macintosh, we can also have a peek on how is it supposed to be when Apple chose Be instead of NEXT in 1990s as the new MacOS.
p.s. Is Wii U the latest widely available PPC device (by widely available, niche device like A-EON X5000 doesn’t count)? I’ve found that second hand Wii U only costs a few hundreds of HK dollars. Also, the only few PPC devices sold in Hong Kong are game consoles and Powermac. I’ve never heard of Amigas sold here.
Playstation 3s also have PowerPC processors (kind of, Cell_(processor) - Wikipedia) and are still pretty common. Too bad the hardware has its specific quirks and Sony did a bunch of things with its firmware to cripple things like Linux installs iirc.
Probably not a worthwhile target all things considered, I just wanted to throw that out there.
