Problems running XFree86 4.2.1 (unstable) on a Motorola Powerstack
Hi,
I recently obtained a Motorola Powerstack (PPC 604e, 128 MB Ram,
Network/Sound/SCSI (wide) onboard) that came equipped with a Cirrus Logic GLD
5446 PCI graphics card. The BIOS identifies itself as Motorola Open Firmware
Version 1.2 RM11. I did not find any documentation or newer firmware on the
web besides some "Motorola Firmware" that is some ARC firmware intended to
boot Windows NT for PowerPC or IBM AIX and refuses to boot linux :(
Debian/PPC (unstable) installed without much problems (the installer kernel
did not recognize the scsi adapter, but that was easily changed by preparing
a newer kernel) and can use the kernel framebuffer, but I have not managed to
run XFree86. I use the latest .debs from unstable (4.2.1-5)
I tried the installed Cirrus Logic card and encountered 2 problems:
First, the debian packages come without the cirrus.o module neccessary to
drive the card, even though the changelog has entries for this card that
refer to bug fixes for the ppc architecture.
Second, trying to use the vga.o module leads to a complete crash of the
system. The console stays blank, a network login is no longer possible and
users who are already logged in only get "illegal instruction" error
messages, whatever they try to do. No logs are written, and so I have no idea
what happens. I tried with the "UseFBDev" and "NoAccel" on and off.
Next I got a Matrox Millenium, and tried the mga.o and vga.o module -> Same
crash. The kernel framebuffer worked flawlessly (tested with fbi and mplayer)
Finally I tried an ATI Rage 3D II+DVD (some Mach64 variant), but the Motorola
Open Firmware would not recognize the card (blank screen instead of the
BIOS). The Powerstack booted nonetheless, and the linux kernel framebuffer
found and used the card. XFree86 with the ati.o driver did not crash the box,
but instead complained that the "card is not initialized" and refused to
start. But it still hosed the framebuffer, which was unusable after starting
X.
I searched google and this mailing list for similar problems, but this kind of
machine seems to be rare, and I found no further hints. A friend of mine
bought the same machine and claims that suse linux runs out-of-the-box which
makes me think that a hardware problem in this specific model could be less
likely.
I found -dbg packages for the XFree86 servers. Is there some way I could use
those to pinpoint the problem? As I wrote earlier, attempts to create logs
from the crashing X server always failed with 0-byte-sized log files or
ext2fs errors in the log file. Makes me think the kernel might have panicked.
Any ideas?
Magnus
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