CRUX PPC

Release Notes for CRUX PPC 2.7

Introduction

This page discusses the relevant changes introduced in CRUX PPC 2.7a.
CRUX PPC 2.7 is released as two different installation ISO: 32bit and 64bit. The 32bit version is based on a single lib toolchain instead the 64bit one comes with a multilib toolchain. These two versions share the same ports tree.
Everybody upgrading from the previous release is advised to carefully read the following notes.

About Power Architecture^® hardware

supported machines:
Apple Power Macintosh G3 Blue&White
Apple 32bit "NewWorld" G3/G4 (PowerBook, iBook, Power Mac, iMac, eMac, Xserve)
Apple 64bit G5 (Power Mac, iMac, Xserve)
Genesi PegasosII, Efika 5200B
Acube Sam440ep, Sam440ep-flex, Sam460ex
IBM pSeries POWER3/POWER3-II/POWER4/POWER4+/POWER5
IBM Intellistation POWER 265/275
IBM eServer OpenPOWER 710/720 
YDL Powerstation PPC970MP

untested machines:
IBM iSeries POWERn
IBM System p POWER5+/POWER6/POWER6+
IBM Intellistation POWER 185/285
Bull Escala EL/PL PowerPC 64bit
Bull Escala EL/PL POWERn
Hitachi SR POWERn
Grande Vitesse Systems GVS9000 PowerPC
Marathon PowerRack G-series
IBM RS/6000 RS64 (I,II,III,IV)
Power.org Bimini Devel Board
IBM BladeCenter JS
IBM BladeCenter JS (SLOF)
Total Impact briQ G3/G4, YDL briQ Node

---- --- --- --- --- --- --- ----

skipped machines:
IBM RS/6000 CHRP (604e/604ev/604r)
Bull Estrella CHRP 32bit

not supported machines:
Apple "OldWorld" G3, Umax w/G3, PowerComputing w/G3
YDL Mai Logic Teron, Genesi PegasosI (April Fix I/II)
Teron Eyetech AmigaOne G3-SE/G3-XE/G4-XE, Micro-A1 C/I
PReP standard PowerPC based products (Apple,IBM,Motorola)
IBM POWER1/POWER1++/POWER2/POWER2+ based products
IBM "Legacy" iSeries POWER3/POWER4
IBM Power Systems POWER7/POWER7+, PowerLinux 7R1/7R2, BladeCenter PS
IBM Power Systems POWER8
IBM PPCA2, IBM PowerEN
Themis PowerPC based products
P.A. Semiconductor PWRficient PA6T-1682M "Electra"
Varisys "Nemo", A-EON AmigaOne X1000
Servergy CTS-1000, P-Cubed
Actis Computer PowerPC SoC based products
Bigfoot Killer NIC PowerPC based cards
Freescale 512x, 5200, 5200B
Freescale PowerQUICC (I/II/IIPro/III) 8xx,82xx,83xx,85xx
Freescale QorIQ P series, T series
Freescale Tower System 512x PowerPC Kit
AppliedMicro APM801xx, APM821xx, APM862xx, APM864xx
IBM BladeCenter QS
PCI Express (PCIe) card (IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell processor based) - CAB (Cell Accelerator Board)
Fixstars Eiger EG-2S
Sony ZEGO BCU-100
Matrix Vision mvXCellBox/mvXCellBox-2
LimePC (all MPC512x SoC based products), Cherrypal C100/C114/C120, Vodacom Linkbook
IBM/AMCC Walnut 405GP, DHT Walnut 405GP, IBM e-LAP
AMCC 405/4x0 SoC
Xilinx Virtex-II/Virtex-4/Virtex-5 
IBM PowerPC 476FP
LSI Axxia ACP3448
Analogue & Micro Taipan PowerPC motherboard
Realm Systems BlackDog, Inaura K9/iD3
Buffalo Terastation TS/HS/TSPRO1 (PowerPC)
LinkStation/KuroBox LS1/HG/HS (PowerPC)
D-Link NAS (PowerPC)
Synology NAS (PowerPC)
Thecus N1200
Excito Bubba|2
Plat'Home OpenBlockS 266/600
RouterBOARD RB 333/600A/1000/1000U
PowerPC game consoles (Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo GameCube, Microsoft Xbox 360)
PowerPC SoC Set Top Boxes

Toolchain updates

CRUX PPC 2.7a includes glibc 2.12.2, gcc 4.5.3 and binutils 2.21.1 .

Kernel

Linux-2.6.36.x

Image

To save space, all packages shipped with the image are compressed with xz, which requires a new version of pkgutils.

Important changes

Important libraries have been updated to new major versions, which are not ABI compatible with the old versions. We strongly advise against manually updating to CRUX PPC 2.7a via ports, since these changes will temporarily break the system:

• libgmp has been updated to version 5.0.x, required by gcc and coreutils ;
• libmpfr has been updated to version 3.0.x, required by gcc ;
• ppl has been updated to version 0.11.x, required by gcc and binutils ;
• xz has been updated to version 5.0.x, required by libarchive ;
• openssl has been updated to version 1.0, required by many packages (most noticeable: wget, which in turn is called by pkgmk to download sources) ;
• libjpeg has been updated to version 8 ;
• libpng has been updated to version 1.4 ;
• cairo is no longer built with support for the glitz backend (this affects GTK+ applications and others) ;
• xulrunner is no longer built with support for dbus and dbus-glib .

core and opt ports

CRUX PPC 2.7a ships with Perl 5.12.x . Minor release numbers are no longer used in the directory layout of perl. It is now possible to update the perl port without breaking every perl extension module.
Our glibc does not contain all possible locales, see handbook.
New features in pkgutils:

• In addition to gzip, pkgmk has been enhanced to optionally compress newly built packages with bzip2 or xz ;
• pkgutils can read packages that have been compressed with bzip2 and xz in addition to gzip ;
• pkgmk has been extended by the --ignore-new command line switch, which makes it ignore new files in a footprint mismatch ;
• pkgmk has learned distinct exit codes for the various errors that might occur.

acl has been added to core collection.
btrfs-progs has been added to core collection.
libattr has been renamed to attr and moved from opt to core collection.
libpcap and glib have been moved from opt to core collection.
support for acl/cap has been added to coreutils.
libmpfr depends on libmpc.
libmpc has been added to core collection.
portmap has been removed from core collection.
NFSv4 support has been added to nfs-utils. This requires a couple of new libraries (keyutils, libevent, libtirpc, libnfsidmap), and portmap has to be replaced by rpcbind. We have moved the entire NFS stack to opt, which is still shipped with the ISO. Setup will handle the upgrade and new requirements automatically.
Default configuration of sysklogd has been extended.
Default logging of dcron is now done via sysklogd.
gtk depends on gdk-pixbuf.
mac-fdisk has been moved to 0.13 + gentoo patches.
libxml2-python and talloc have been added to opt collection.
links has been replaced by elinks in opt collection for 64bit too.

xorg ports

CRUX PPC 2.7a ships with Xorg 7.6 and xorg-server 1.10.x.
mesa3d depends on libxml2-python and talloc.
Default X font path has been changed to /usr/share/fonts/X11 .

Miscellaneous notes

Please be sure you are using the latest version of firmware for your own machine.

When upgrading from CRUX PPC 2.6 to CRUX PPC 2.7a, the setup program will take a while completing the Please wait [2.6 -> 2.7 check] phase.
CRUX introduced a new boot file: /etc/rc.fix for generic operations to be excuted at boot time. At the moment the script takes care of font cache generation for xorg, so your very first boot under CRUX PPC 2.7 will take a few additional seconds.

ofpath from yaboot is still unable to find devices on Apple's machines using new libata (pata) linux kernel drivers.
We recommend to read the path devices directly through /proc/device-tree/aliases/ anyway are present ofpathname (from IBM powerpc-utils) and new-ofpath i.e. the reworked script by JoseJX from Gentoo PPC.
As suggestion you ought to use new-ofpath for Apple machines and ofpathname for IBM machines.

IBM RS/6000 CHRP (604e/604ev/604r): the support for these machines has been removed from 32bit ISO.

Acube Sam460ex: the support for these machines has been added into 32bit ISO.

Genesi Efika users: bootkernel shipped with CRUX PPC 2.7a has "Root file system on NFS" enabled, see Efika Install HowTo. Bootkernel doesn't use Device Tree Supplement (efika-dts-20071114.zip) because unmaintained and there are some important issues with recent kernels.

Acube Sam440ep and Sam460ex users: please, consider to update u-boot on your board.

Known issues

Apple iMac G5: if you are experiencing difficulties booting, try with "apple64 video=ofonly".
Genesi PegasosII: Marvell DiscoveryII sram gigabit ethernet [mv643xx_eth] support in kernel > 2.6.31.2 is newly broken.
Genesi Efika: audio support in kernel < 2.6.34 is unstable. Anyway to enable it you need a reworked Device Tree Supplement forth script.
IBM pSeries POWER4+ or older: you could read some kernel warning like "ata1: lost interrupt (Status 0x50)" thus try adding "libata.dma=0" .
Acube Sam460ex: boot from SDHC and audio support aren't yet implemented.
YDL Powerstation: if you are experiencing difficulties booting, remove any PCIE usb2 or Firewire addon cards.

Tips

YDL Powerstation quad G5 (SLOF): to boot at yaboot prompt try with "cdrom:0,/ppc/ppc64/vmlinux root=/dev/sr0" or "cdrom:0,/ppc/ppc64/vmlinux root=/dev/sr0 console=ttyS0,19200".
IBM Blade, IBM pSeries POWER5 or newer: choose a proper working hvc0 or hvsi0 console.
Genesi Efika: choose a proper installation method like via NFS or from USB pendrive.
Acube Sam460ex: onboard SATA2 controller works only with LBA48/NCQ hard disk drives .

As CRUX PPC 2.7a uses new pata drivers, all the disks are now seen as scsi, so what used to be hda will now be sda, and the cdrom will be sr0 and if you still experience any problems booting then try adding "rootdelay=20" or more.

Errata

The dhcpcd support is broken on current installation ISO and it was fixed on trunk only.