On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 02:16:04PM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

quoted

Hold your horses, I'm just a simple user without too much
understanding of the hardware trying to get most out of his PowerBook
G3 Lombard (with broken L2 cache: 33bogomips) which I got a week ago :)

What makes you think it has a broken L2 cache ?

During the time Mac OS9 was on this machine, the machine would
occasionaly boot with a window displaying a message along the lines
'problem with memory'. I forgot the exact error message, but it
involved memory in general (so not L2 specific). When the message
would not display, the machine would hang randomly after some time
(say, 1 hour).

I was told the Apple Store owner suggested swapping the motherboard to
fix it, but I don't know the expertise of him either.

I got this hang once in Linux and I seem to remember /proc/cpuinfo
containing a line 'L2 cache: 1024Kb' or something like that. After
that first hang, I cannot find the L2-cache line in /proc/cpuinfo any
more _and_ I did not have a single hang (apart from during rebooting).

Actually I hoped to be able to play with the l2cr values (whatever
valid values might be for this machine), but I cannot find the
corresponding /proc/sys/kernel/l2cr which should exist according to
Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt . It might be that a smaller value
(say, 512Kb) might still work. I don't know.

Furthermore the machine feels sluggish. A kernel compile takes ~5.5
hours, while the same compile on my P4 takes ~10 minutes. But it might
be normal for a 400Mhz G3, I don't know...

The 33 bogomips are
totally unrelated, it's the timebase frequency. Bogomips are NOT a
benchmark and on the powerpc architecture, and not even related to the
processor speed at all (but to the frequency of the timebase input).

Goolging around for 'lombard bogomips' I got the impression the value
should be 600 to 800, or at least of that order of magnitude. Since 33
is far outside this range, I thought that to be the reason. Apparently
not, then...

quoted

It seems suspend-to-ram is working to some extend, or at least
'should' work out-of-the-box. When I close the lid and reopen it, it
resumes 'a little': PCMCIA cards seem to power up again (TX/RX WiFi
led starts to flash again), but the screen stays dark. I haven't tried
to debug this yet, since getting WiFi to work

Does it work better without the PCMCIA card ? Is it properly going to
sleep (snoozing LED) ? Also make sure you are using the proper video
driver (atyfb on the lombard) and not booting with "novideo" or
"video=ofonly".

Ok, I got further with this one thanks to you :)

Suspend-to-RAM works like a charm! However, when it wakes up the
screen is black (and I thought the suspend had crashed...). With fn-F2
(increase brightness key) I can make the screen visible again.

quoted

Furthermore I'm not interested in kexec if 'all is working'. But since
'rebooting' already hangs after the powerdown, I'm more focused on
getting the normal 'reboot' working.

That is the strange thing... does it reboot fine in MacOS ?

Uhm, I got this second-hand machine 1.5 weeks ago, and I wiped MacOS
in day one. So I cannot remember. It also looses track of date/time
once in a while (not always!) after pressing the reset-button on the
back (which I need to bring it back to life).

How am I supposed to power down the machine? halt -p? With
'powerprefs' I can only select different suspend modes but not
power-down modes...

This leaves me to some OOPSes still:
  - removing the PCMCIA wifi card (Orinoco) while the network is up
  - booting the machine with the wifi card inserted
  - bringing up the wifi card while no access point is found

(maybe-related:)
And a warning in dmesg which reads (no OOPS):
pcmcia: the driver needs updating to supported shared IRQ lines.
...which corresponds to /proc/interrupts :
 22:    4912397   PMAC-PIC  Level     yenta, pcmcia0.0

The wifi-at-startup-OOPS:
pccard: PCMCIA card inserted into slot 0
cs: memory probe 0x0c0000-0x0fffff: excluding 0xc0000-0xfffff
cs: memory probe 0x60000000-0x60ffffff: excluding 0x60000000-0x60ffffff
cs: memory probe 0x80000000-0xfcffffff: excluding 0x80000000-0x81ffffff
cs: memory probe 0xfd000000-0xfdffffff:Machine check in kernel mode.
Caused by (from SRR1=49030): Transfer error ack signal
Oops: Machine check, sig: 7 [#1]
...
Call Trace:
[D30ABD40] [D5044E90] pcmcia_read_cis_mem+0x15c/0x274 [pcmcia_core] (unreliable)
[D30ABD70] [D5045110] read_cis_cache+0x168/0x16c [pcmcia_core]
[D30ABD90] [D50452B8] pccard_get_next_tuple+0x100/0x454 [pcmcia_core]
[D30ABDD0] [D50456A4] pccard_get_first_tuple+0x98/0x144 [pcmcia_core]
...

When I insert the PCMCIA card at a later stage, there are no 'cs: '
lines in dmesg at all.

So still some riddles to be solved ;)

-- 
Rutger Nijlunsing ---------------------------------- eludias ed dse.nl
never attribute to a conspiracy which can be explained by incompetence
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