PowerPC bugs

[∅]

My life has been nuts here lately and then had a failed AC adapter on my nVidia-equipped PowerBook but I'm back, albeit incredibly late.

I've tried about every single permutation of various boot paramters (including the apparently magical vt.handoff=7) and have not succeeded into booting into an installable live CD. My only successes have been with an auto-generated Xorg.conf with accelleration off. 

I will admit that I don't know much about these parameters and as much as I'd like to, time is running out. To ensure that we can get a PPC release for 12.10, I know that at least among Lubuntu-QA we have discussed providing the documentation necessary for users to actually make use of the new releases. It seems that for nVidia it seems that the only way to make this happen is to get people to install with an alternate and then make the required changes.

I know that we prefer not to use variable boot parameters and I know this is even worse, but unless someone can offer me some other suggestions for boot parameters to try out, I'm not sure we have another choice.

Either way, someone please let me know one way or another so I can write the appropriate wiki page. Thanks!

wxl

On Sun, 7 Oct 2012 16:17:22 +0100
o jordan <ojordan12345 at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> > 
> > On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 01:53:32PM +0100, o jordan wrote:
> > > Is it too late to get some PowerPC changes into the yaboot options on
> > > the live/desktop ISOs?
> > >  
> > > I have an idea to build back in the legacy nvidia framebuffers into
> > > the PowerPC kernel.  Whilst this is a backwards step in many respects,
> > > it is the only way (I can think of) to get over the 16 colour
> > > limitation of the openfirmware framebuffer.  Currently if you turn off
> > > kernel modesetting with nouveau (and this it seems is a necessity now
> > > for many cards of some vintage) you are thrown into a desktop with
> > > only 16 colours on PowerPC and this is a largely unusuable desktop.
> > >  
> > > As this kernel change will disable KMS (which we don't want to do for
> > > every nvidia card) the boot options need updating so that the legacy
> > > framebuffers are turned off by default:
> > >  
> > > video=radeonfb:off video=rivafb:off video=nvidiafb:off  
> > > Since you cannot easily remove default yaboot parameters a new
> > > 'failsafe' option would need to be created on the desktop ISO without
> > > these parameters.  This could replace the 'nosplash' option.  The new
> > > yaboot parameters would be: nomodeset vt.handoff=7 I know you don't
> > > think vt.handoff=7 makes any sense with yaboot, but it does actually
> > > boot you into a higher colour depth than you would without it.  This
> > > solves the problem of the installer windows not appearing in 8 bit
> > > pseudo colour. I think I can create a patch for yaboot-installer (to
> > > also introduce a failsafe option on an installed system), but I have
> > > no clue what files are involved in the creation of the ISOs.  If you
> > > can point me in the right direction then I can take (a rather
> > > uneducated) look at them and see if I can come up with the necessary
> > > changes myself. Of course this all depends on getting the PowerPC
> > > kernel changed, something that I have struggled to do in the past.
> > > Like yourself they are very cautious about changes.  I would need help
> > > from somebody within Canonical to support the kernel change. These
> > > changes would not improve the out-of-the box everything working 100%
> > > on the first boot support of the PowerPC port (that can only come from
> > > the kernel/radeon/nouveau developers), but the creation of a failsafe
> > > mode would make the radeon and nvidia user experience much better.
> > 
> > To be honest, as I think I said before: I'm not going to touch these
> > options at all without review from the kernel and X teams (CCed).  If
> > they say it's necessary, then sure; but I would rather that somebody
> > first checked whether this is a consequence of a bug we can fix, because
> > it's always better for the software to work by default than to require
> > boot parameters.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > 
> > -- 
> > Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com] Thinking about this some more, the KMS option shouldn't be the default option on the live/desktop ISOs.  The crashes/freezes with radeon can take some time to appear.  It is quite conceivable that they could occur in the middle of re-partitioning, which would be bad. The more you think about, the more appealing the Debian way of doing things is: Just rely on the user to add video=ofonly if they want KMS.  This is basically what the boot message says to do at the moment anyway, although it doesn't explicitly mention KMS. Adam
>  		 	   		  

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