Re: Heat-death of the last of the 2-socket/2-cores-each PowerMac G5s that I have access to

[Off list.]

On 2021-Jan-12, at 08:42, Dennis Clarke via freebsd-ppc <freebsd-ppc at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On 1/12/21 4:38 AM, Mark Millard via freebsd-ppc wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 2021-Jan-11, at 17:42, Mark Millard <marklmi at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> . . .
>> 
>> . . .
>> 
> 
> 
> The shipping cost of a replacement unit would be more money than the
> entire machine itself.

Crossing an international border probably would not help in that
respect.

I'm in the Portland, Oregon, USA area. But I do think that for
such PowerMacs to continue to have FreeBSD Tier 2 support for
any significant time, Brandon Bergren or Justin Hibbits or
Nathan Whitehorn or such would be the better target for the
machine (unless they all refuse). If they all were to refuse,
that itself would indicate a rather limited support, even
relative to tier 2 status.

Even if the high end G5's had not failed, I'd been worried
about them (and other PowerMacs) staying viable, just from
FreeBSD progressing beyond G5 support (and such). For
example (common to G5/G4):

WARNING: Device "openfirm" is Giant locked and may be deleted before FreeBSD 13.0.
WARNING: Device "kbd" is Giant locked and may be deleted before FreeBSD 13.0.

I've not seen any evidence that anyone intends to work on
avoiding those uses of the Giant lock. There is also, on some
G4's that I have access to,

WARNING: Device "agp" is Giant locked and may be deleted before FreeBSD 13.0.
WARNING: Device "consolectl" is Giant locked and may be deleted before FreeBSD 13.0.

Such warnings are from post-git builds.

The "Code slush" started on 2021-Jan-08. stable/13 is scheduled
to branch on 2021-Jan-22.


> I have four of these units where I keep one
> of them running neatly. I think I have half a dozen more somewhere
> in the back of a warehouse in Toronto.

Hmm. The international border issue would be involved if I was
the receiver of such.

> Back in 2010 ( or earlier )
> they were fantastic CPU powerhouse units running some math crunch
> daemons that I wrote. Also, hard to believe but it was more cost
> effective than running the big SPARC64 units that I had at the
> same time. Ever tried to run Sun/Oracle M4000 or M5000 machines?

No Sun/Oracle M4000 or M5000 machines. The only SPARC context
was working someplace that used SPARCstations. (I do not remember
model numbers or such.)

> In any case please drop me a line off-list and let's see if we can
> figure out a way to get a workable unit into your hands.

I would encourage finding out if Nathan, Brandon, or Justin would
accept a quad G5 first and go with that if one of them would
accept one. (I've no clue how to pick if more than one said yes.)


FYI:

I have SSD media, ECC RAM and non-ECC RAM, and video cards for
these type of machines if I end up with the potential machine.


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)

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