Radeon GPU Acceleration On PowerMac G4 under Linux?

[bralt45]

Hey guys, first time poster here with a question.

Has anyone here gotten GPU Acceleration to work on a PowerMac G4? I'm currently running gentoo on a PowerMac3,6 the slowness is killing me! Software rendering only gets me 25fps on glxgears without anything else running in the background. I'd love to get linux to work on this mac with some decent performance. If anyone here has gotten their powermac to run with gpu acceleration on with KMS I would love your help!
Here are some relevant specs:

System: Host: G4-PPC Kernel: 4.20.0-gentoo ppc bits: 32 Desktop: Xfce 4.12.4
Distro: Gentoo Base System release 2.6
CPU: Dual core 7455 altivec supported (-MCP-) cache: N/A
clock speeds: max: 1416.666661MHz MHz 1: 1416 MHz 2: 1416 MHz
Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RV250 [Radeon 9000 Series]
Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.20.3 ) driver: radeon Resolution: 1600x900@60.00hz
OpenGL: renderer: softpipe version: 3.3 Mesa 18.3.1
Audio: Card SoundByLayout driver: AppleOnbdAudio Sound: ALSA v: k4.20.0-gentoo
Network: Card: Apple UniNorth 2 GMAC (Sun GEM) driver: gem
IF: N/A state: N/A speed: N/A duplex: N/A mac: N/A
Partition: ID-1: / size: 50G used: 23G (48%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/root
ID-2: /home size: 111G used: 15G (15%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/hdb3
ID-3: swap-1 size: 2.15GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/hdb2
Info: Processes: 111 Uptime: 1:03 Memory: 269.0/1508.5MB Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 2.3.56

 

[gsahli]

It's working for me but I have an entirely different OS and system.
PMG4 MDD 867 (w/ upgrade/1Ghz CPUs), 1.75 G ram and radeon 9600XT (RV360). Using Ubuntu MATE 16.04. GLXgears says the frame rate is fixed at Vertical refresh, so I get 60 FPS.

**Congrats on getting Gentoo working. I tried just last month, and several dependencies failed to 1) download) or 2) compile. I thought that powerpc gentoo was just in an experimental state.

two things I have to do to get Ubuntu ppc to work right:
Give yaboot this startup line (type after boot> prompt, later put it in yaboot.conf):
Linux radeon.agpmode=-1 modprobe.blacklist=ams
and create this simple /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Radeon"
Driver "radeon"
EndSection

 

[bralt45]

PMG4 MDD 867 (w/ upgrade/1Ghz CPUs), 1.75 G ram and radeon 9600XT (RV360). Using Ubuntu MATE 16.04. GLXgears says the frame rate is fixed at Vertical refresh, so I get 60 FPS.

Congrats on getting it working! From what I've found so far on google it seems that gpu support is spotty at best when it comes to linux and KMS. I assume the reason you have it working so well is because RV360 (i think that falls under r300) has better support than RV250 (which falls under r200).
If worst comes to worst and I can't get this GPU to work ill bite the bullet and see if I can get a GPU thats confirmed to work (You just confirmed the Radeon 9600XT so ill probably look into that one).

**Congrats on getting Gentoo working. I tried just last month, and several dependencies failed to 1) download) or 2) compile. I thought that powerpc gentoo was just in an experimental state.

Thank you! Thats weird that some dependencies failed to download/compile on your machine. When I installed gentoo there were hardly any hickups (apart from the lots of time spent). The only trouble with my machine really is the lack of GPU acceleration. Freshly compiled powerpc software is nice and all but being able to count the frames on screen kinda ruins the fun for me xD

 

[pochopsp]

Some time ago I was obsessed on getting the Radeon 9000pro working properly under Linux. The only systems I got it working were Ubuntu 6 (very very very old and unsupported) and Debian 7.11 wheezy (with a trick which won't work for you as it was related to Debian only). Here's a video I recorded of it working fully 3D accelerated under Debian 7.11:

My advice is: try to get a card which is better supported.