Newbie with Fedora Core 4 PPC on Power Mac G5.

[Brian D. Carlstrom]

Karanbir Singh writes:
 > > 2) "yum check-update" returns something about some file missing in 
 > > /var/....
 > 
 > yum list updates, thats what you want. There is no such command 
 > check-updates anymore.
 > 
On my FC4 system, "yum check-update" lists what "update" would install,
and gives an exit code so that scripts can see if updates are available.

Something like "yum self-update" is gone.

 > > 5) no sound
 > 
 > once your machine is updated, run system-config-sound, that will find 
 > and activate your sound card fine.

he is on YDL 4.0.1 I think at this point in the thread and probably
won't have sound support compared to FC4.

 > > 6) windfarm module problems
 > 
 > I have no idea wtf the the windfarm is :)

windfarm* is the newer set of thermal driver that will replace
therm_pm72.c someday according to Benjamin Herrenschmidt.

 > > Any ideas, suggestions, advice would be appreciated. Hopefully you or 
 > > someone else will have some good ideas. I need every bit of help that I 
 > > can get at this point. I am about to tear my hair out and I can't be 
 > > positive that 4.1 is going to solve all of this :-( My experience hasn't 
 > 
 > 4.1 of what ? there is no FC4.1 - its going to be FC5 now.

he means YDL 4.1.

 > > Hardware Overview:
 > > 
 > >   Machine Name:    Power Mac G5
 > >   Machine Model:    PowerMac9,1
 > >   CPU Type:    PowerPC G5  (3.0)
 > >   Number Of CPUs:    1
 > >   CPU Speed:    1.8 GHz
 > >   L2 Cache (per CPU):    512 KB
 > >   Memory:    1 GB
 > >   Bus Speed:    600 MHz
 > >   Boot ROM Version:    5.2.2f2
 > > 
 > 
 > At this time I am running FC4/ FC5(rawhide) and a CentOS4 install on my 
 > G5, they all run great - baring the few hicups I had a few days back 
 > with rawhide.

Note he has a PowerMac9,1, which needs the windfarm_pm91.c driver. 

I have FC4 on six PowerMacs (one PowerMac7,2 and five PowerMac7,3) and
on two of the 2.7GHz PowerMac7,3 machines I've been having overheating
problem. There is a known bug in the 2.6.14 therm_pm72.c driver, which
is patched in 2.6.15:

commit 6ee7fb7e363aa8828b3920422416707c79f39007
Author: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org>
Date:   Mon Dec 19 11:24:53 2005 +1100

    [PATCH] powerpc: g5 thermal overtemp bug
    
    The g5 thermal control for liquid cooled machines has a small bug, when
    the temperatures gets too high, it boosts all fans to the max, but
    incorrectly sets the liquids pump to the min instead of the max speed,
    thus causing the overtemp condition not to clear and the machine to shut
    down after a while. This fixes it to set the pumps to max speed instead.
    This problem might explain some of the reports of random shutdowns that
    some g5 users have been reporting in the past.
    
    Many thanks to Marcus Rothe for spending a lot of time trying various
    patches & sending log logs before I found out that typo. Note that
    overtemp handling is still not perfect and the machine might still
    shutdown, that patch should reduce if not eliminate such occcurences in
    "normal" conditions with high load. I'll implement a better handling
    with proper slowing down of the CPUs later.
    
    Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org>
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds at osdl.org>

However, when I switched to FC4 the updates-testing kernel to get the
patch, now my fans run full blast as if no driver is talking to the
hardware (as I saw when the PowerMac7,3 first came out and therm_pm72.c
did not check for it). Unfortunately the machines are in production so I
can't try FC5 at the moment, so for now I live the the noisy fans.

 > What problem are you having with the fans ? are they running at full 
 > speed ? as root run 'modprobe therm_pm72' does that resolve the situation ?

This does not work for me with the recent FC4 updates-testing kernel
because the driver is not built as a module which I found odd. I posted
on fedora-test-list and got no followups.

 > For some obscure reason, I didnt all the emails from this thread... just 
 > some of the odd sniplets.

Both of us sporadically get the following response. Every post I get
this message on has never been posted, so I don't think a moderator is
actively looking for review these.

-bri

Your mail to 'Fedora-ppc' with the subject

    Newbie with Fedora Core 4 PPC on Power Mac G5.

Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval.

The reason it is being held:

    Message has a suspicious header

Either the message will get posted to the list, or you will receive
notification of the moderator's decision.  If you would like to cancel
this posting, please visit the following URL:

    http://<deleted>