The FreeBSD/ppc project pages contain information about the FreeBSD port to the PowerPC® architecture. As with the port itself, these pages are still a work in progress.
The FreeBSD/ppc port is still a Tier-2 platform. That means it is not being fully supported by our security officer, release engineers and toolchain maintainers.
1 July, 2005: This page has been significantly updated.
FreeBSD/ppc is in HEAD branch of the FreeBSD CVS repository. However there is an ISO image available for download here. Please follow instructions given here.
Courtesy of Peter Grehan and Tilman Linneweh, you can find some packages here and here.
Peter Grehan is the project lead. Contact him if you can contribute code. If you just want to know about the status of this project, check this page regularly or join the FreeBSD/ppc mailing list.
The FreeBSD/ppc port should run on any New-World machine. People reported FreeBSD runs on following machines:
Manufacturer | Model | Submitter (optional links) | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
Apple | iMac G3 350 MHz | Martin Minkus | Rage 128VR |
Apple | iMac G3 Revision B | Peter Grehan | Rage 3D Pro 215GP, accel disabled |
Apple | eMac 700 MHz | Peter Grehan | Nvidia GeForce2 MX |
Apple | Mac Mini G4 1.4 GHz | Tilman Linneweh (dmesg) | None |
Apple | Powerbook G4 1.33 GHz | Peter Grehan | Nvidia GeForce G5200 |
To subscribe to this list, send mail to freebsd-ppc-subscribe@FreeBSD.org or visit mailman interface.
On-board BMAC+ ethernet doesn't work. There is a work-in-progress bm(4) driver available on Peter Grehan's personal page here (see if_bm.c and if_bmreg.h).
There is no graphical mouse cursor on console.
Fdisk does not work.
Only USB keyboards are supported.
If you have Bluetooth, there is a 'fake' OHCI port and devices created that can be used to access a wireless keyboard or mouse. Problem is, it gets probed before the fixed keyboard/mouse and is first in line to syscons. To get around this, the PCI slot associated with the problematic ohci2 can be disabled at the loader prompt:
OK set hint.pcib.1.skipslot=26
For ATI Radeon-based machines:
A ofw syscons range check needs to be relaxed using the sysctl hw.ofwfb.relax_mmap.
A special radeon driver is needed. You must add the following your xorg.conf into the
Section "Device":Option "iBookHacks" "on"
There is a known bug in the boot-loader, that prevents you from loading an alternate kernel, so testing your kernel is a bit risky. When booting the loader from the OpenFirmware prompt, give it a partition which is either non-existent, doesn't have a kernel to load, or isn't a UFS partition:
0 > boot hd:loader hd:0
At this point, you can set currdev and manually load a kernel:
OK set currdev=hd:14 OK load /boot/kernel/kernel.save
Some patches are needed to build your own world and kernel:
RELENG_5 (GCC 3.4.2): rs6000.c.diff and sysv4.h.diff
HEAD (GCC 3.4.4): rs6000.c.diff and sysv4.h.diff