Documentation PPC Specific Content Beat

PPC Specifics for Fedora

This section covers specific information about Fedora and the PPC hardware platform.

Hardware Requirements for PPC

Processor and memory

• Minimum CPU: PowerPC G3 / POWER3
• Fedora 25 supports the New World generation of Apple Power Macintosh, shipped from circa 1999 onward. Although Old World machines should work, they require a special bootloader which is not included in the Fedora distribution. Fedora has also been installed and tested on POWER5 and POWER6 machines.
• Fedora 25 supports pSeries and Cell Broadband Engine machines.
• Fedora 25 also supports the Sony PlayStation 3 and Genesi Pegasos II and Efika.
• Fedora 25 includes new hardware support for the P.A. Semiconductor 'Electra' machines.
• Fedora 25 also includes support for Terrasoft Solutions powerstation workstations.
• Recommended for text-mode: 233 MHz G3 or better, 128MiB RAM.
• Recommended for graphical: 400 MHz G3 or better, 256MiB RAM.

Hard disk space

The complete packages can occupy over 9 GB of disk space. Final size is entirely determined by the installing spin and the packages selected during installation. Additional disk space is required during installation to support the installation environment. This additional disk space corresponds to the size of /Fedora/base/stage2.img (on Installation Disc 1) plus the size of the files in /var/lib/rpm on the installed system.

In practical terms, additional space requirements may range from as little as 90 MiB for a minimal installation to as much as an additional 175 MiB for a larger installation.

Additional space is also required for any user data, and at least 5% free space should be maintained for proper system operation.

4 KiB Pages on 64-bit machines

After a brief experiment with 64KiB pages in Fedora Core 6, the PowerPC64 kernel has now been switched back to 4KiB pages. The installer should reformat any swap partitions automatically during an upgrade.

The Apple keyboard

The [Option] key on Apple systems is equivalent to the [Alt] key on the PC. Where documentation and the installer refer to the [Alt] key, use the [Option] key. For some key combinations you may need to use the [Option] key in conjunction with the [Fn] key, such as [Option]-[Fn]-[F3] to switch to virtual terminal tty3.

PPC installation notes

Fedora Installation Disc 1 is bootable on supported hardware. In addition, a bootable CD image appears in the images/ directory of this disc. These images behave differently according to your system hardware:

• On most machines

The bootloader automatically boots the appropriate 32-bit or 64-bit installer from the install disc.

• 64-bit IBM pSeries (POWER4/POWER5/POWER6)

After using OpenFirmware to boot the CD, the bootloader, yaboot, automatically boots the 64-bit installer.

• Genesi Pegasos II / Efika 5200B

The Fedora kernel supports both Pegasos and Efika without the need to use the "Device Tree Supplement" from powerdeveloper.org. However, the lack of full support for ISO9660 in the firmware means that booting via yaboot from the CD is not possible. Boot the 'netboot' image instead, either from the CD or over the network. Because of the size of the image, you must set the firmware'sload-base variable to load files at a high address such as 32MiB instead of the default 4MiB:

setenv load-base 0x2000000

At the OpenFirmware prompt, enter the following command to boot the Efika update, if necessary, or the netboot image from the CD:

boot cd: /images/netboot/ppc32.img

Or from the network:

boot eth ppc32.img

You must also manually configure OpenFirmware to make the installed Fedora system bootable. To do this, set the boot-device and boot-file environment variables appropriately, to load yaboot from the /boot partition. For example, a default installation might require the following:

setenv boot-device hd:0
setenv boot-file /yaboot/yaboot
setenv auto-boot? true

• PA Semi Electra

The Electra firmware does not yet support yaboot; to install on Electra, you can boot the ppc64.img netboot image. After the installation, you will need to manually configure the firmware to load the installed kernel and initrd from the /boot partition.

Refer to the firmware documentation for further details.

• Sony PlayStation 3

For installation on PlayStation 3, first update to firmware 1.60 or later. The "Other OS" boot loader must be installed into the flash, following the instructions at http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/manual.html. A suitable boot loader image can be found on Sony's "ADDON" CD, available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/.

Once the boot loader is installed, the PlayStation 3 should be able to boot from the Fedora install media. Please note that network installation works best with NFS, since that takes less memory than FTP or HTTP methods. Using the text option also reduces the amount of memory taken by the installer.

For more info on Fedora and the PlayStation3 or Fedora on PowerPC in general, join the Fedora-PPC mailing list (http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ppc) or the #fedora-ppc channel on FreeNode (http://freenode.net/).

• Network booting

Combined images containing the installer kernel and ramdisk are located in the images/netboot/ directory of the installation tree. They are intended for network booting with TFTP, but can be used in many ways.

The yaboot loader supports TFTP booting for IBM pSeries and Apple Macintosh. The Fedora Project encourages the use of yaboot over the netboot images.

PPC Specific packages

• The ppc64-utils package has been split out into individual packages reflecting upstream packaging (ps3pf-utils, powerpc-utils, powerpc-utils-papr). Although the mkzimage command is no longer supplied, you can use the wrapper script from the kernel-bootwrapper package:

wrapper -i initrd-${KERN_VERSION}.img -o zImage-${KERN_VERSION}.img vmlinuz-${KERN_VERSION}