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NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini and making the kernel power failure proof
- microcolonel 7y agoThe fire extinguisher on the desk is a nice touch; though I'm not sure that's enough volume to extinguish a G4 fire.
- giobox 7y agoI don’t recall the G4 PowerPC designs being unusually hot running by standards of the day? The G5 was of course, but it was much worse in this regard than the G4.
- reaperducer 7y agoYeah, the G5 was a scorcher. But I remember my G4 laptops turning my thighs red, too.
- tomxor 7y agoAs an owner of both G4 and G3 laptops, I can assure you, eggs will fry given the right task... The G3 was actually worse.
- ianai 7y agoLong way from reports of fires. I’ve only heard of lithium batteries doing that
- tomxor 7y agoNo it's the chips, these machines didn't exactly have the most user friendly heat dissipation design, on both models the CPU heat conducted straight through to the top case. maybe not cook an egg very fast but uncomfortable to touch for more than a second... maybe 1 EPH (one egg per hour) :)
- UncleSlacky 7y agoThe early Intel MacBooks weren't much better - my black 2007 2,1 model gets pretty hot and has a serious lack of ventilation holes.
- microwavecamera 7y agoNow the old Powerbook 5300's actually did catch fire. My 1st tech job was a hardware technician at an Apple production facility mostly building and refurbishing Powerbooks, can confirm.
- mikece 7y agoSomewhere there are chip designers thinking they can create the first processor on which NetBSD cannot run. Have fun kids: many have tried that and failed!
- quickben 7y agoMill architecture?
- rjsw 7y agoMaybe. NetBSD doesn't have an equivalent of the nommu variant of Linux.
- verisimilitudes 7y agoNot every chip mimics a PDP-11 or can be made to resemble one. Chuck Moore's GA144 is an array of his F18A Forth chips, which are all rather small and simple stack machines that support such fine grained operations as looping the instructions that share a machine word. Given that this is a heavily segmented machine, with very different primitive operations than a PDP-11, and also has a word size of eighteen, I don't imagine C would run very well on it at all, if you even wanted to try. So, there you have it.
- Dylan16807 7y agoI'd say that the stack machine in the GA144 is feasible to compile normal C to. And the 18-bit word is barely a problem. But the (complete lack of) memory architecture is a clear dealbreaker. There's no compiling a normal C program down to an architecture that has 64 words of RAM. At best you can gang a few cores together to make an emulator for a simple virtual machine.
- MrRadar 7y agoFor those who are not familiar with the author of this blog, he is a PowerPC enthusiast and the maintainer of TenFourFox, a Firefox port to PPC OS X. He's also currently working on a new PPC JIT for (modern) Firefox on Linux (a project for which he is looking for volunteers to assist him[1]) to bring it to speed parity with Chrome on PPC (which already has a PPC JIT). [1] https://www.talospace.com/2019/03/pitch-into-firefox-jit.html https://www.talospace.com/2019/03/pitch-into-firefox-jit.htm...
- dillonmckay 7y agoWhat is the last supported OS X version for PowerPC processors?
- IntelMiner 7y ago10.5.8 "Leopard"
- krackers 7y agoDo you mean webkit on ppc (since I searched but couldn't find a chrome port)
- MrRadar 7y agoThere is a community Chromium port to PPC Linux[1]. Modern PPC Linux distros should have it in their repositories. So far Google has not accepted the patches to enable PPC support upstream[2]. [1] https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Porting/Chromium https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Porting/Chromium [2] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-dev/MYq1DPz9Tak https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...
- jchw 7y agoI just picked up a G4 iBook and am grateful for TenFourFox. Combined with uBlock Origin legacy builds, it’s actually usable for some modern sites, which is pretty impressive.
- classichasclass 7y ago
- oneplane 7y agoAs fun as this is (and as much as I appreciate putting good old hardware to use and as much as I like PPC): the power consumption alone wouldn't make this a winner :( I have a PowerBook G4 DVI, iBook G4, B&W G3, GbE G4, Dual G5 here, I want to get rid of them but I like them too much. Yet I can't run them for fun all day long either because the amount of power they eat >:( The problems of a hardware connoisseur.
- WWLink 7y agoo_O Compared to what? G3s and G4s are pretty light on power usage - IIRC they use around 10-15w? The G3s were even less. The i7 in my desktop uses at least 95w, and some reviews suggest it's more like 140w lol. Edit: Unless you're pairing them with CRT monitors...
- oneplane 7y agoCompared to say.. a 1W ARM CPU. Those are faster and use less energy.
- davesmith1983 7y agoI use my Amiga 1200 a lot. It isn't fast or efficient. It is a vintage piece of hardware which I enjoy using.
- classichasclass 7y agoAuthor here. Power consumption on this unit is about 21W. Is the CPU/watt ratio less than later units? You bet. But it's not bad, it's free, it's not in a landfill, and it's more than enough grunt for the basic tasks it's doing.
- oneplane 7y agoYeah, those Mac Minis can go quite low. But still the CPU power from any PPC vs. an ARM or low-end x86 is a bit inverted. A low-end ARM or x86 that is faster than any of the PPCs while using less than half the power (in the 1W to 8W range) does make a dent.