Still crosscompiling
I own this late and great Powermac11,2 Powermac G5 Dual Core 2,0 GHz and I love this machine for being what it is: a great retrobattle station and also a sexy workstation. It is so clean, no cables, everything can be accessed easily.
Even the PowerPC 970MP [^1] Processors are known for getting really hot, the machine fans are not loud even under heavy load while compiling latest e.g. Firefox Version 133 for PPC64. And this is the moment were I want to setup something to crosscompile. Because I don't want to run the Powermac all day and all night with 78 degree Celcius all the time while compiling and I don't want to consump so much electrical energy.
And here is why I decided this way. An ./t2 upgrade command will
last for complete 7 days and 14 hours. It is a command were I first updated
the SVN Tree with svn up and than did that upgrade,
like apt-get dist-upgrade. But in T2/Linux, there are no binary
packages. Everything is built from scrath like in Gentoo Linux.
That's good. That's bad. :-)
So I setupped my Mac Mini M4 (Standard) to crosscompile for PPC64 - and I tried a lot of different things to get this done. But nothing worked from start to the end yet.
I installed QEMU and installed a PPC64 Distro. There are not a lot of PPC64 capable Linux Distros outside, all the main ones dropped support. But there is a an inofficial version of DEBIAN for PPC64 [^3] or one from ARCH Linux and also SUSE. So I decided to install DEBIAN on both my Powermac G5 and in a QEMU virtualiziation on that M4. But that ran not good, I often got hard locked kernel errors so I moved forward and install a UBUNTU for ARM64 in a Docker Container with only crosstool-ng software to crosscompile from there to ppc64. I tried with Firefox. But there are a lot of problems regarding the BIG ENDIANess of PPC64, all the other CPUs (Architectures) like x86 or ARM are using Littel Endian. But that also does'nt work and I decided to install T2/SDE Linux from famous Kernel Hacker Rene Rebe into qemu and later into a Parallels Installation as both PPC64 and then ARM64.
PPC64 in QEMU is the same as in real hardware and no crosscompiling is needed, which is easier to maintain, slower but fewer problems while compiling, but it is really slow (even when you not emulate a PPC 970 Processor from 2004 but a Power9 from 2015) and also there were that HARD LOCKED KERNEL Errors, but arm64 crosscompiling is to complex to get it work properly. Not to talk about the try to install crosstool-ng (wich I had success with) with HomeBrew in macOS directly, but had the problem of the endianesses again :( So nothing of that worked and I tried to install another ARM64 version of T2/Linux in VirtualBox. This because in VirtualBox there are no restrictions if you use a free plan version like me with Parallels, regarding the numbers of cpus or the amount of ram (only 4 Processors, only 8 GB of Ram).
But... also here I have problems and I am not smart enough to figure out how to crosscompile from the Start to the End in a way with T2/SDE that my Packages are working on the Powermac G5. I want to compile complex things like GNome or Firefox or a whole updated PPC64 Distro-ISO File. I compiled a whole Desktop / X.Org / PPC64 G5 optimizied World but in the End I am unable to compile sysfsutils (actually) and the process breaks, I always get the folling error:
bash-5.2# ./t2 build-target --cfg system
Removing old error logs ... Removing var/adm/logs/2-sysfsutils.err ...
15:22:34 Building 2-filesystem/sysfsutils (2.1.0) ~9s Building in src.sysfsutils.system.241215.152233.11505, with 8 threads Writing output to $root/var/adm/logs/2-sysfsutils.out Corrected ./ltmain.sh ! checking whether build environment is sane... yes ! checking for gawk... gawk ! checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes ! checking for powerpc64-t2-linux-gnu-strip... powerpc64-t2-linux-gnu-strip ! checking build system type... Invalid configuration `aarch64-nocross-linux .. ! configure: error: /bin/sh ./config.sub aarch64-nocross-linux-gnu failed ! Due to previous errors, no 2-sysfsutils.log file! ! (Try enabling xtrace in the config to track an error inside the build syst .. +00:00:03 Aborted building filesystem/sysfsutils Unmounting loop mounts ...
It remains exciting.
Tags: vintage computing, powermacg5, crosscompiling
Ressources
- [^1]: This is Footnote Number One.
- [^2]: T2/Linux is especially for cross compiling.
- [^3]: Download: debian