MP 1,1-5,1 Mac Pro 4,1 Running Leopard forever - Operation Norge

[MrCheeto]

Basically no possibility of a final stable bug-free release before they push out a [rarely] 'new' and [never] 'improved' version.

I just love when a developer has to make OS-specific changes EVERY YEAR, and when they get burnt out of updates so it breaks indefinitely.

Part of the issue that I had with SL is that many of the Leopard apps were just updated apps from prior systems, as far back as Cheetah. SL had a requirement for the new 64bit or Core technology and WOAH, snip snip. If you didn't manually go and update your software, you were canned. Many chose to simply let go and we lost a lot of great apps.

Now, this is a yearly thing. Notice how things like Black Magic apps have minimum OS requirements that increment with every new release? Well, if they get tired of implementing new technologies (Metal) every year, then so-long!

I have found many many apps in my recent searches that claim they require any OS from "10.0-10.5" or "10.1-10.5". After that, it's "10.6-10.9" "10.10" "10.11" "10.12-10.13" etc.

XP was the most accessible OS I ever used. It's not just because everybody from enterprise to the third-world adopted it, it's that it was around for so long that it was guaranteed to be supported by ANY Windows-app developer for a solid seven-years!

OS X was similar at one time. Can Leopard run a Cheetah App? Jaguar? Panther? Tiger? When I was using Leopard, I got the impression that if it was for OS X, it was for Leopard. It didn't matter what year it was released or for which specific OS. Snow Leopard purged a huge portion of a still-useful programs that spanned about eight-years.

What if your music collection was purged and no longer playable at the Autumn of every year? Listen to today's music now, or listen to nothing at all. Purge Purge Purge. That's what going from High Sierra to Mojave to Catalina does. California is truly cursed.

Flash it to 5,1, install Mojave to get the rest of firmware updates and you're set to go back to Leopard.

What? You can confirm, without any doubt, that Leopard will natively boot and support Westmere CPU's?

I thought the 5,1 shipped with Snow Leopard - making 10.6 the earliest possible OS X release we would ever be able to install.......?

LBF confirmed that they did, indeed, boot Leopard on a real 5,1.

Leopard does not have any sort of board ID checks, that started with Lion

Leopard will happily boot on a MacPro5,1 so long as you have Nehalem CPUs

(although you will need a MacPro4,1 era GPU if you want graphics acceleration)

 

[Amethyst1]

graphics in slot 1 is a minefield due to the absence of 4K in any card architectures available back then.

Driving a “4K” monitor at 30 Hz is possible using a graphics card supported in Leopard … or even Panther (v10.3).

Leopard and Snow Leopard have no TRIM support at all.

Snow Leopard gained TRIM support with v10.6.8 IIRC.

 

[Amethyst1]

Posted from my Mac Pro running Leopard.

…booted from a PCIe AHCI SSD? Those benchmarks look nice! And what GPU is running the “4K” display?

 

[MrCheeto]

…booted from a PCIe AHCI SSD? Those benchmarks look nice! And what GPU is running the “4K” display?

I think they're great compared to the 7200RPM drive in the screenshot! And you nailed it: AHCI SSD attached to PCIe x4. I'd expect no gains from x16 since 1500MB wouldn't even saturate the x4.

The SSD is 1tb and currently dual-booting 10.5.8 and High Sierra. Can't believe just how fast it is. It is slow to post (gong) though... Takes about 10 seconds or so.

GPU spec is in the System Profiler. GT120! Not that it doesn't sheer windows when moving them around at 4k, but my desire was to simply use the GT120 for previewing photography edits on a 55-60" screen while main edits and work are done on something more powerful driving dual displays.

I really can't say how happy I am that I've just imported, converted, edited and prepared for print an image all on this Mac and all within Leopard. It FLIES!

 

[Amethyst1]

AHCI SSD attached to PCIe x4.

SM951?

The SSD is 1tb and currently dual-booting 10.5.8 and High Sierra. Can't believe just how fast it is.

Once you go PCIe, you wonder how you put up with "slow" SATA SSDs for so long!

 

[MrCheeto]

You got it. I saw the SM951 performance test at Barefeats and figured I couldn't go wrong. 1,500MB both ways, and that's exactly what I got. Only way faster, me thinks, is NVMe or RAID cards.

Hey, I put an SSD in all of my crappy old Macs and even with SATA 3.0 I'm not always saturated. I'm not buying the crappiest drives, either. The 17" MBP (last one) I'm typing on now just did 200write/400read with BlackMagic. So it's not neck-breaking, but I can't fault the latency or lack-of.

Now then...I wonder how SCSI2SD will perform in the Quadra...

 

[zedex]

BAREFEATS records are good (excellent even).. so how do I source a copy of Leopard to test it all out..?

 

[MrCheeto]

BAREFEATS records are good (excellent even).. so how do I source a copy of Leopard to test it all out..?

Sheesh, that's a good question. Legally? IDK. And I wouldn't go probing for torrentts either, as I have little trust in the security of it.

I'll be completely honest. If you're using Snow Leopard, it's going to hurt to go backwards. There are such convenient features and the performance boost is always noticeable. I use Leopard because I'm extremely, EXTREMELY, particular about certain things. They're so minor that I can't usually detail what they are, but when I'm using SL or a later system and it happens, my reaction is, "WELL THAT NEVER HAPPENED IN LEOPARD!".

Again, full disclosure, the niggles that I eschew are so so microscopic that I will not be able to even describe them until I start toying with 10.6 again.

 

[jscipione]

Future Upgrades:
2.93GHZ used CPU swap
ATI Radeon HD4870 (in addition to the GT120)
32GB RAM
PCI SSD install

I have an ATI Radeon HD4870 and a boxed copy of Adobe CS4. Would those interest you?

 

[MrCheeto]

@jscipione USA? DM Me

 

[hwojtek]

What? You can confirm, without any doubt, that Leopard will natively boot and support Westmere CPU's?

I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't. AFAIK it's the firmware that prevents 4,1 from Westmeres, not the OS. Now while the official minimum for 5,1 is ❄️Leopard, I believe it may be investigated further. Here are some insights.

 

[Amethyst1]

In snow leopard you can have an OS agnostic HIGHPOINT SSD7103 (or equivalent) PCIe 2.0 x16 HBA in SLOT 2 giving you the ability to pack up to four (4) Samsung SM951 AHCI Version PCIe SSDs in to one slot and run all four at max speed concurrently (6000mbps in RAID 0).

If the SSD1703 is OS-agnostic, wouldn’t it also work in Leopard? The SM951 itself works fine in Leopard.

I can see that 'gigabit' ethernet really means max data transfer speeds of 195 mbps.

1 Gigabit per second is 1000 megabits per second, real-world transfer speeds including overhead are usually around 100…110 megabytes per second, sometimes higher, sometimes lower.

If 'fibre channel' and 'ethernet' are interchangeable terms […]

Ethernet and Fibre Channel are two different things.

An internal USB 3 header would be constrained to the link width maximum of 195 mbps.

One-lane PCIe 1.0 is 2.5 GT/s or 250 MB/s max, with the real-world max being somewhat lower.

 

[Amethyst1]

I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't. AFAIK it's the firmware that prevents 4,1 from Westmeres, not the OS.

Beginning with the G5-specific build of version 10.2.8, Mac OS X checks the CPU type when it boots. If it stumbles upon an “unknown” CPU, such as one newer than itself, a kernel panic may occur.

Leopard natively wont boot on a Westmere CPU, you will need a Hackintosh kernel to do so or possibly CPUID spoofing with OpenCore if you have already gone down that Route

 

[zedex]

@Amethyst1

On the SSD7103 - you are completely correct.

Al the other numbers come from the cMP Mid 2010 Block Diagram (I've attached it)..

One-lane PCIe 1.0 is 2.5 GT/s or 250 MB/s max [all correct] real world after 8b/10b overhead is accounted for.. 195-200 MB/s

 

[MrCheeto]

The "superdrive" bays are not special (or eSATA)

The ports where the drive bay leads meet the motherboard are indeed eSATA. Limitation is that it’s still just SATA 2.0, so not worth exploiting.

The mini PCIe slot has just enough speed that I did consider that if I wanted to add an SD card slot into the machine, that would be the way to do it. My fastest cards are about 130MB/s.

There was also the option of adding SD reader to the USB slot that is being occupied by the Bluetooth card. I believe that the cable that goes to Bluetooth will address only one device, so it’s sufficient to add some internal or case-mounted device and give it direct board attachment. You’d have to fashion the harness but the protocol is there. If you use an Airport card with integrated Bluetooth, this is a no-compromise solution to adding USB 2.0 devices to your Mac Pro. Truly everybody's greatest desire...


So LBF mentioned a Hackintosh kernel. AFAIK, that would mean I could side-load the kernel into the boot drive. The kernel would bipass the CPU ID check and... ? Damn. There's only one way to find out. If I really have to be the first person dedicated enough to find out if Leopard will boot to Westmere CPU's on Apple hardware, I'd be pretty disappointed in the tweakers here. Actually, would that canonize me as an official Tweaker?

I'm going to see how much differs in the official Kernel and the Hacked one. I'd like to modify as little as I can, so if I could target disk mode into the Pro and just flip a switch kernel-wise, I'd be all for it! Anything to prevent more firmware writes.

 

[Amethyst1]

So LBF mentioned a Hackintosh kernel. AFAIK, that would mean I could side-load the kernel into the boot drive.

The hidden mach_kernel file in the root directory of your Leopard partition is the kernel. Using another kernel boils down to replacing this file and fixing its ownership and permissions.

One-lane PCIe 1.0 is 2.5 GT/s or 250 MB/s max [all correct] real world after 8b/10b overhead is accounted for.. 195-200 MB/s

That's more than enough for Gigabit Ethernet.

 

[tsialex]

If the SSD1703 is OS-agnostic, wouldn’t it also work in Leopard? The SM951 itself works fine in Leopard.

SM951-AHCI and High Point SSD71xx cards are a extremely bad fit. From not being possible to install the HPT drivers, to sleep issues and KPs. Since you can't use real NVMe drives with anything earlier than Sierra, forget it.

For a long time I had 4x SM951-AHCI + a SSD7101A-1, it's only really stable with High Sierra and you can only use AppleRAID.

Also, don't forget the TRIM issues with SM951 drives after full, when the blades slowdown to 200MB/s.

 

[tsialex]

The ports where the drive bay leads meet the motherboard are indeed eSATA. Limitation is that it’s still just SATA 2.0, so not worth exploiting.

SAS, not eSATA.

 

[zedex]

SAS, not eSATA.

Isn't it just SATA (standard 7-pin data connector MINUS the 15-pin power connector).. It's definitely not eSATA. I maybe incorrect.. or I maybe talking somantics.. happy to be corrected either way

 

[tsialex]

Isn't it just SATA (standard 7-pin data connector MINUS the 15-pin power connector).. It's definitely not eSATA. I maybe incorrect.. or I maybe talking somantics.. happy to be corrected either way

The backplane drive bays are SAS-2, for the AppleRAID card. I think that the exact model is SFF-8482.

 

[MrCheeto]

The backplane drive bays are SAS-2, for the AppleRAID card. I think that the exact model is SFF-8482.

What’s this? If I’m interpreting you correctly, this feeds the backplane HDD ports to the PCI controller? Thus...if we spliced into this, maybe I could get SATA 3 through the backplane?

Any exploits you can imagine? Remember I’m trying to move data in and out faster than SATA 2 and USB 2.0. So far it seems Gigabut Ethernet is the fastest and ten-gig if I’m lucky enough to nail down a Leopard-supported card.

 

[tsialex]

What’s this? If I’m interpreting you correctly, this feeds the backplane HDD ports to the PCI controller?

Two additional SATA connections that go to the DVD drive bays. You probably are trying to do what some people did with early-2008 Mac Pros, that the SATA ports are outside the backplane, not possible with an early-2009.

Thus...if we spliced into this, maybe I could get SATA 3 through the backplane?

Nope, this is a standard soutbridge controller SATA port. The southbridge SATA ports are SATA2, you will never get if faster.

SATA and SAS goes to the MUX controller near slot-4, you need an AppleRAID card if you want to use SAS disks.

Any exploits you can imagine?

Nope.

Remember I’m trying to move data in and out faster than SATA 2 and USB 2.0. So far it seems Gigabut Ethernet is the fastest and ten-gig if I’m lucky enough to nail down a Leopard-supported card.

Gigabit Ethernet is less than 90MB/s real life, even with jumbo frames enabled. I doubt that you can get 10GigE with Leopard support.

 

[MrCheeto]

alex strikes again All good info for the final write up.

Only thing I would argue is that there were 10GigE NIC's advertised for PowerMac G5! That's the reason I'm even venturing down that road. If somebody thinks they can help, I'll dig up my bookmarks and saved sites and try to find it again. I emailed the company asking for Leopard support and got no response, heh.

 

[dataharvested]

Absolute. Hero.

This alone is worth the $130.

I agree. That intro video was awesome!

 

[mectojic]

Hiya,
Just wanted to say how much I'm enjoying reading this thread. I'm a PPC G3/G4 guy myself, got my first taste of Macs on a G3 iMac (OS 9) and a G5 iMac (10.4), and I loved the experience. So I've been slowly upgrading a G3 B&W with similar goals to yours, to make a dual boot OS 9 / 10.4 machine.

It's an inspiration to see someone so dedicated to using an old OS, and making it shine. Honestly the whole Classic Mac Pro forum is inspiring to see the defiance and innovation going on, but I haven't seen many projects as unique as yours. 👍