Is X850XT supported?

[cloverskull]

I’ve been struggling for hours to get a linux distro to boot on my G5 with AGP Radeon X850XT and am about to throw this computer in the garbage. Lol. Sorry for being dramatic

As far as I can tell the X850XT is simply _not_ supported. At some point during the boot process, no matter what kernel args I have so far attempted, I can’t get this darned thing to work. It’s very frustrating. During the boot process, regardless of distro, suddenly the screen will just go black. CTRL-ALT-F<#> doesn’t do anything, it’s just completely unresponsive. Any ideas here? Am I hosed with this GPU?

Thanks!

[Maitreya]

[NeddySeagoon]

cloverskull,

Build Simple Framebuffer into the kernel too.
I suspect the kernel is switching to radeondrmfb and you have some bits missing or you have other Framebuffer hardmare drivers enabled that interfere with radeondrmfb.

Simple, VESA, VGA and EFI are safe as they don't do any hardware set up.
Your hardware is too old for EFI and I suspect VGA is not supported on a G5 either.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[cloverskull]

Hey folks, thanks for the replies

I think the issues that I'm having are a bit unique. I believe the X800XT and X850XT on Mac were unique and there may not actually be linux support at all. Most of the research I've done suggests that there have traditionally been issues with these cards and that they haven't been usable in the past...I was hoping that would be different but evidently the Mac version of the cards had a different BIOS.

I have very significant issues booting anything. If there's a simple framebuffer built into the kernel, what can I use at boot to kill the Radeon framebuffer, KMS, etc., and just use the simple framebuffer?

The only thing I can actually get to boot to a screen I'm able to use right now is the Debian 10 PPC port, which goes to a textmode installer. This suggests that there must be a textmode interface I can use to boot post installation, but I can't figure out the magic boot string to issue at yaboot.

I appreciate the help here

[Ant P.]

Try booting with agp=off. Some of the X models from that era use pcie-to-agp bridge chips and driver support for them has always been hit or miss.

Besides, the AGP code is bitrotting to the point where upstream intends to remove it.

[kahuna]

I have an X850XT sitting on my desk at the moment. I'm still using the Radeon 9650 and I was planning to swap it with this X850XT, now ... I'm not so sure...
Were you able to make it work?
Thanks!

[kahuna]

I'm playing around with it as I write this post so, replying to myself

It's actually an X800XT Mac Edition AGP (Based on R420 Radeon chipset).

It works perfectly fine in both MacOS X and MorphOS.
However, when I go into the boot selection (pressing 'option' in my G5 before the chime), the screen looks garbled, quite difficult to read the labels of the Mac boot selector.
Things look even worse in the GRUB menu. It improves a bit when finishes booting (I guess the font changes and this is slighly more readable), but it's still difficult to read any text on the screen.

I've tried to start XFCE4, basically it freezes when the X.org is starting up.
It's using the 'radeon' driver. There are no erros on the Xorg.log, these are the last lines:

[kahuna]

Well, another comment if I may.

I went back to my trusted Radeon 9650 AGP, saw the same problem with the fonts in both the Mac boot selector as well as in any text screen in Gentoo.
It turns out, for some reason, it's due to the DVI port you decide to use. I haven't much choice on the X800XT as the port 1 is ADC and I don't have an ADC monitor or adapter. So, I connected my monitor to the DVI port 2 on this card.
Inadvertently, I did the same when I went back to the 9650. Fonts are fine when I connect my monitor to DVI port 1 (no ADC here).

Wondering if this stuff with display ports has to do somehow with the freeze starting the X.org...