24.Dec.2012
MorphZone (Forum)
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MorphOS: Status report on G5-port
As a result of the bounty project two G5-PowerMacs as well as money have been donated for the port von MorphOS (amiga-news.de reported). Now there is also a first status report.
wielkastopa wrote: "I got the first G5 machine set up on the 3rd of December and I have been busy with the MorphOS port since then. Basically the work so far has consisted of two major parts: Reorganising the Quark source code so that support for a second CPU architecture could be added and writing and testing all the code required to support the PPC64 architecture, and in particular the Powermac G5s.
The G5 is incompatible to regular PowerPC CPUs in a number of, for MorphOS, important aspects, both when it comes to the supervisor mode and the user mode. Unfortunately some of the supervisor mode incompatibilities have been done in such a way that executing code written for PPC32 on the G5 will run without errors, but subtle differences in the operation of some instructions caused problems with system stability which were hard to track down. The good news is that I believe that all of these problems have now been tracked down and the system is running stable. When it comes to user mode differences, the G5 is lacking CPU instructions which are widely used throughout MorphOS' 68k emulators. Luckily Piru did some changes there and the emulators should work fine on the G5 now, although I haven't really tested it.
So the status now is that the G5 boots to MorphOS and seems to run stable, however only USB and the on-board IDE interfaces are support by MorphOS drivers right now. The next things I will focus on is getting the on-board NIC and fan control working. Hopefully neither of those two will be particularly difficult, so that will likely be done some time this week."
(snx) (Translation: dr)
[News message: 24. Dec. 2012, 18:53] [Comments: 0]
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