Mac on Linux performance on G5?

rtyall · n00b Joined: 12 Jul 2005 Posts: 23

Hi, I've got a dual 2.0 G5 powermac and was wondering how responsive virtual machines within mac-on-linux would be? Ie, would emulating leopard in a virtual machine be really slow and unusable, or would it be fairly quick?
It's currently running leopard and as a result I can't use virtualPC on it, so I'm looking for alternatives to get multiple OS's installed, not so much for use but for reference purposes and testing.

Also, does anyone know if are there any windows(i686/x64) virtual machine apps that can be installed on PPC linux?

bmaass · n00b Joined: 15 Mar 2008 Posts: 25

MacOnLinux will NOT run on G5s. This is a real bummer, since it's a damn fine PowerPC virtual machine, and so easy to use too. When it runs (older Kernels on G3s and G4s), its performance is near-native.

Edit: an alternative to MOL might be Sheepshaver. Try it, it sometimes works, but it's not as easy to use as MOL.

About X86 emulators, you could try to get qemu running, but all I ever got it to do on my G5 is segfaulting. There's no real point to it anyway, since its performance even on a 2.5GHz G5 was excruciating when I tried it under OSX. Not anywhere near the speed of VirtualPC from Microsoft, which is already horribly sluggish even under Windows 2000.

LordManta · n00b Joined: 23 Aug 2006 Posts: 18 Location: Paris

Moreover, mol dev seems stopped for a year or so now. So I think you shouldn't hope any release which support G5. Don't know much about the status of mol on the other Linux distribution...
I've waited for many years a port on the G5 processor ; but it seems as a very huge task and no more people interested in now.

rtyall · n00b Joined: 12 Jul 2005 Posts: 23

Thanks for that info, I'll have a look into sheepshaver.
Despite virtualpc not being made for leopard, I've installed it anyway and it's working fine.
The performance is pretty good, although I now wish there was a way to set the affinity of processes to the cpus.