Hi,


I also have a Powermac G5 Quad and tried with both the Geforce 6600 and
Quadro FX4500 video cards and I have successfully gotten it up and running
using the nouveau driver along with 2D acceleration on the XOrg desktop. I
have compiled many newer kernels and created debian packages for them.
Newer 4.0+ kernels also have issues in terms of detecting the nvidia DCB
from the FCODE ROM… But there are other workarounds for this to get it up
and running. You shouldn't need to use the boot parameter
"nouveau.noaccel=1" once you have properly configured your kernel.



In my case, the reason why X does not seem to work with your configuration
is twofold:



The recent Debian (and Fedora) kernels for PowerPC 64 Bit running on the G5
64bit powermac are configured with a 64Kb kernel pagesize. This works
slightly better in terms of performance, however the nouveau driver does
not support this size. You must recompile the kernel unfortunately and
configure with 4Kb kernel pagesize as this is what nouveau will work with
for now.



To confirm, run the following command in a shell as root:

“getconf PAGESIZE”

If it returns 65536, you are using a 64Kb pagesize kernel.

Otherwise if it returns 4096, i.e. 4Kb kernel pagesize, check the next item
below.



The newer nouveau drivers in more recent kernels default to using MSI
interrupts, however with the PPC G5, when using  MSI interrupts, the
powerpc FCODE rom on Nvidia cards does not correctly set up the MSI address
(or vector).



To confirm, run the following command in a shell as root:

“cat /proc/interrupts”



Look for the nouveau interrupt, if it is using MSI interrupts, you need to
disable MSI interrupts either by passing the option to the nouveau module,
disable MSI interrupts by passing an option to the kernel command line in
yaboot.conf or disable MSI interrupt support in total when compiling a new
kernel. If configured correctly, nouveau should be using level or edge
interrupts.





This is what worked for me anyway.



Cheers,

Peter

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