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Hey all,

 

Haven't been around in ages, and searching didn't yield any results - but has anyone found a way to run Leopard on G3s at this point? (Please don't cite the min reqs at me I know what they are :)).

 

We have SSE2 kernels for OSx86 running; - would it be a simple recompiled kernel swap out to get Leopard running on a G3 or is there something even more important missing that stops it booting?

Sortof. I have the original wwdc '06 build running (9a241). I have a B&W with a 1GHz G4 upgrade, 1GB RAM, & a flashed FX5200 for CI/QE (and getting a 6200 soon). I haven't been able to get the GM (9a581) installer to run yet. But in doing some pretty instense digging, Long story short, I think that yes, a patched Kernel would do the trick.

 

Long story long, here's why I think that. One problem is that even if you modify the OSInstall.mpkg file to remove the bad machine check, it doesn't matter. The B&W gets to the grey apple then immediately panics with the 'Unable to find drivers for this platform, Powermac1,1' error. (Same would be true for the Yikes! G4 but instead of Powermac1,1 - it would be Powermac1,2) So the problem is clearly deeper than a modified install file. So I started digging around the source code and found the code that causes the KP is here:

http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/iokit/Ker...=xnu-1228#L1378

After some more digging, I realized that the kernel panic's wording isn't really 100% true. I mean, everything on my device tree should technically be suported (G4 w/ Altivec, enough RAM, QI/CE/OGL Video Card, etc). The drivers are there but it seems like it's looking at the machine type to know which resources to load in, instead of the individual devices themselves. Obviously in reality, its a bit more complicated than just adding the B&W (or Yikes) and their respective configurations to a supported machine "List." But that's essentially what it boils down to imho. I'm not technical enough to even begin to know how to recompile the kernel to make my machine type into a matching IOPlatformDevice. All I can do is look through the code and try to find patterns and things that make sense. But I would love it if someone could take a crack at it. Like you said, we have SSE2 kernels for OSx86 running, why not an Unspported PPC Machine kernel for Machines that have enough upgrades to meet the Leopard specs?

i lately installed 10.5.1 onto a 2nd generation g4 (dual-600/700!?, 1gb) and it was just not really useable throughout the day. it's just too slow for that platform. 10.4 works fine, i won't argue that but 10.5, sorry - i just don't think that it'll make you happy at all.

yeah i'm not worried about the speed thing either, i mean with 1GHz it should do fine for what I use mine for. :P but yes the question is just seeing if anyone can get it to run at all. doesn't seem like it would be that hard to modify the kernel, and I would try it myself, but like I said, not the first clue of where to start. hopefully someone within these hallowed forums with a wealth of kernel knowledge can try it. i'll gladly do the testing for it if someone else can program it! :)

  • 5 months later...

Well, for anyone that's still interested, we've finally got retail leopard (all the way to 10.5.4) up and running on G4 upgraded Pre-AGP Macs!

Check out the action over at the AI Forums:

http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=88395

haha very true, ShadowFox. Of course these are all G3 machines that have upgraded G4 processors (i.e., mine is a B&W with a a 1 GHz Sonnet G4). I don't think you could ever really hack Leopard to run it on a non-upgaded G3, since it has to have the Altivec from the G4.

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