FreeBSD 10.1 on PowerMac 7,3

Martin Kukac logout128 at gmail.com
Mon Feb 23 14:30:13 UTC 2015


Hello,

I have PowerMac G5 2.0DP (PM7,3 but has PowerPC 970 (version 2.2) CPU 
not the fx ones) and I'm trying to make FreeBSD working on it. I'm sorry 
if problems I will mention in the following text were already discussed 
here, but I didn't find answers, when I searched through the list.

Install was quite straightforward, though I had to download USB image 
and boot from USB, because ISO did always hang during boot. The only 
minor problem here were inverted colors in virtual consoles, which 
persists even in the installed systems, but I can live with that, as I 
mainly work in X, where colors are OK.

The first problem I have is power/thermal management  - CPUs seem to be 
stuck on 1300MHz instead of 2000MHz and what's bigger problem - I don't 
think fans work the way they should. Sysctl output displays constant rpm 
on all fans except the "backside" one and from what I saw inside the 
case system really does not modify speed of any other fan. Temperature 
of both CPUs seems to be constant as well, I have never seen different 
temperature than that right after the boot. This is a problem, because 
during Xorg compilation system warned me that the U3 has reached 92C and 
I'm a bit afraid about the machine.

The second problem is (maybe it has something to do with inverted colors 
in terminal) that after I start X session, all virtual consoles become 
broken. Even though input still works, text is not readable, it looks 
like this: http://i61.tinypic.com/wnq7p.jpg
The card is Radeon 9800 Pro.

Any suggestions? I wanted to replace Debian on my machine with FreeBSD 
and I didn't expect to end this soon.

Thanks,

Martin



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