So being a want to play with power and powerpc i FINALLY came upon a mac g5 quad 2.5ghz, i will be upgrading it to 16gb 800mhz ddr2 and dual rx550 4gb. and a pciex4 nvme adapter for a 500gb nvme ssd i will have a small ssd to actually control boot to save time. once this is all done i will install void linux PPC to have semi modern software… i might work on back porting some software for power* to powerpc
Didn’t think there would be PowerPC drivers for RX550? I’d be checking into that before wasting your time (and money)…
there are power drivers for amd and forcing them has been done so its just a process
the g5 quad is based on the ibm power architecture so wont be hell just not straight forward
the mac g5 sata connections are sata 1.5 which is sloooowwwwww but using a pcie source as boot isn’t possible really with out booting to a internal drive first. so having a small ssd for boot and then running off pcie after ‘post’ is the end goal its been done im just copying people for most of my plans
You should be able to get a pcie sata adapter to work (either 2.5", m.2 or whatever), but not nvme. Nvme has to be supported by the chipset.
well we can see what i can force and how fast i can get it
I’m not an expert on this, but afaik, the nvme standard didn’t exist until well after the G5 was EOL. I don’t think it’s physically possible…
Anyway, knock yourself out, but if I were you, I’d just use a pcie sata adapter.
so working on the g5 quad i flashed*(testing might need to redo) the firmware of the main board 'openfirmware ofw was the og i used openbios which is a updated firmware for ofw
the BIG reason i flashed the mainboard with openbios
also im stupid lucky that the mac g5 was not updated on its firmware or i would not have been able to do this
@thro and @oO.o all hardware works on a G5 (pcie at least lol) just gotta flash openbios and tada.
It’s just a computer, even if from apple 
Is nvme working?
Note to most people doing this, or wanting to, fw updates were rarely done by end users and didn’t come down the update streams. Ever. You had to do it by hand, and if you signed up for email updates back in the day you would often be notified that new ofw was out. This was a big deal for businesses as often it enabled some stuff for gpu’s, enabled new storage options, and more commands to configure hardware or disable it completely. From a security and stability standpoint, this was key for a lot of corps and schools.
End users, however, almost never did these updates. And often you can find a G5 2.3, 2.5, or 2.7 dual core without the fw updates. At least in my research.
When you go on YT and look at G5 overviews they are looking at it from a nostalgic point of view, not from a ppc enthusiast point of view. Even for the agp models these upgrades on the fw can enable a LOT of features, and I’m thinking about picking up 1.6 and 1.8 GHz machines and stuffing them full of data cards and ssd’s on the pci slots, then setting them up with void Linux and selling them as storage servers. They will be super powered for what they are doing, and far far more affordable (64 bit, low clock, low power risc with flash storage? Total cost of a kitted machine alone with the data cards will be at most 80 bucks and some time).
Very very viable options as appliances, cheap as shit too.
Waiting to hear from sink myself, but it’s literally a matter of flashing openbios, doing like 2 commands to have a consistent mount and to correctly address the space, and Bam it really **just **works
**If you know how to set it up
getting the nvme drive out of my laptop later for testing i need to back up everything on it tho
I was under the impression that nvme required physical chipset implementation but I would love to be proven wrong.
Not really. It does on Intel machines, but on ofw/oB machines you can do hip emulation as well as chip data captures. Power 5 and Power 4 are very very similar, and with the 2013 oB image that sink flashed you get nvme utilities along with many useful commands.
Wrap this one around your brain. Stock apple fw there’s exactly ONE kit of ram that is useable for a 32gb setup. And it’s probably one that apple themselves used. However, if you had, say, 64gb of sodimms on sodimms to dimm adapters, in openbios, you can configure blocks of storage and set up block addressing. Meaning, you could make the system think there’s 8gb of ram, for example, but the firmware can handle the memory allocation leaving you with an actual 64gb of ram. Or at least that’s what I have been told by very very reliable sources.
You could never do this with a normal x86 machine, even with libreboot. And that’s a limitation of the chipset. Ppc machines, at least from apple, have a wholly different kind of chipset. In essence it’s sorta similar to an fpga, if you needed a comparison. At least that’s the best one I can come up with. You can change EVERYTHING. Possibly even bus clock speeds and bandwidth limits, but idk that it will change stuff for the apple boxes.
Edit: another description could be that ofw/oB are almost like a whole os unto themselves. And not the systemd meme of it being an os. I mean like you could probably port lynx and connect to Google. That’s how powerful it is just by itself.
Also fun note is there’s a lot of similarities between other machines (sun, sgi, etc boxes that have same fw type). So potentially I could flash oB to my sunblade 2500 or to an ultra45/60 and get the same result as sink did with her G5. It really is a completely different landscape, and shows what real workstations, albeit opensource based ones, are actually capable of.
There’s reasons I like this hardware specifically, and not because old stuff is cool
Edit 2: also for note, those nvme chipsets probably emulate a similar operating environment to what these machines can provide. I’m not saying nvme was made for these machines, but nvme certainly likes more open space to work with, if that makes sense.
quadro 4500fx best card that could be flashed to work with openfirmware on the g5 (for now). it needs to be flashed to work that way so woo fun time
Did the nvme work?
