YDL PowerStation Support

[Ummon Karpe]

I am considering purchasing the YDL PowerStation:
http://www.fixstars.com/en/products/powerstation/

One of the considerations in wether I buy it or not is if I will some
time in the future be able to install OpenBSD on it, replacing Yellow
Dog Linux. I will be willing to compile from source if necessary.
Looking at the specs
(http://www.fixstars.com/en/products/powerstation/specs.html), it uses
SLOF, which appears to be an implementation of OpenFirmware.
Additionally, I see that the Broadcom BCM5780 seems to be a supported
ethernet device. However, the macppc port does not claim support for
the ATI X1650 gfx card. Is this a problem? Most importantly, though,
the YDL PowerStation uses two dual core 2.5ghz G5 chips. If I
interpret the supported hardware page correctly, the quad core Power
Mac G5 is not supported. Also, does OpenBSD/macppc actually make use
of the extra cores, or does it just utilize one core? This might be a
dumb question, but I have only run OpenBSd on a G4 Cube, so I am not
sure what the status of SMP support on PowerPC is.

Thanks for any help,
Ummon

[Mark Kettenis]

> From: Ummon Karpe <ummonk@...>
> Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:07:28 -0500
>
> I am considering purchasing the YDL PowerStation:
> http://www.fixstars.com/en/products/powerstation/
>
> One of the considerations in wether I buy it or not is if I will some
> time in the future be able to install OpenBSD on it, replacing Yellow
> Dog Linux. I will be willing to compile from source if necessary.
> Looking at the specs
> (http://www.fixstars.com/en/products/powerstation/specs.html), it uses
> SLOF, which appears to be an implementation of OpenFirmware.
> Additionally, I see that the Broadcom BCM5780 seems to be a supported
> ethernet device. However, the macppc port does not claim support for
> the ATI X1650 gfx card. Is this a problem? Most importantly, though,
> the YDL PowerStation uses two dual core 2.5ghz G5 chips. If I
> interpret the supported hardware page correctly, the quad core Power
> Mac G5 is not supported. Also, does OpenBSD/macppc actually make use
> of the extra cores, or does it just utilize one core? This might be a
> dumb question, but I have only run OpenBSd on a G4 Cube, so I am not
> sure what the status of SMP support on PowerPC is.

The reason the quad core Power Mac G5 isn't supported has little to do
with the processor support.  The problem is related to some weirdness
in the interrupt controller.  SMP on PowerPC seems to work fairly
well; snapshots and releases are built on an SMP machine!

However, I don't think you'll be able to boot OpenBSD/macppc on that
machine.  The IBM firmware is probably different enough from the Apple
firmware to require a few tweaks in the bootloader and the early
kernel bootstrapping code.  Shouldn't be too difficult, but it is
still somewhat hardcore kernel hacking which won't happen unless you
do it yourself or get hardware in the hands of one of the OpenBSD
kernel hackers.