Linux for PowerPC on QEMU (g3beige) - System Information

QEMU & Linux for PowerPC

A recent post (see Linux for PowerPC on QEMU (mac99) - System Information) looked at Linux on QEMU's 'mac99' machine, an emulation of an Apple PowerMac G4 (AGP Graphics). But what about QEMU's other Power Macintosh system?

QEMU

QEMU provides an emulation of the older, Apple Power Macintosh G3 ("beige").

Checking Apple Support, EveryMac.com, Wikipedia the hardware specification for the 'g3beige' would be:

System	Apple Power Macintosh G3 ("beige")
Mac Firmware	OldWorld
CPU	PowerPC 750 @ 233, 266, 300, or 333 MHz; upgrade to G4 @ 350 or 400 MHz
RAM	32, 64 or 128 MiB (768 MiB max.)
Bus	PCI
Storage	built-in IDE controller; 128GB max. HD
	built-in SCSI controller
	4GB SCSI, 2x 4GB SCSI or 8GB IDE hard disk(s)
	24x ATAPI/IDE CD-ROM
Floppy	3.5" 1.44MB
Video	ATI 3D Rage II+, ATI 3D Rage Pro, or ATI 3D Rage Pro Turbo, 6 MiB VRAM
Audio	Whisper or Wings personality card
Network	built-in RTL-8029(AS) 10 Mb/s 10baseT ethernet
Keyboard & Mouse	ADB

Third-party processor upgrades offered higher spec. G3 and G4 options. Since the emulation will determine the processor speed, we'll go with the default processor.

Emulation Command

For reference the QEMU command used:

qemu-system-ppc \
    --machine g3beige \
    -hda hda_DebianLinux_g3beige.qcow2 \
    -cdrom debian-8.11.0-powerpc-DVD-1.iso \
    -g 1024x768x8 \
    -net nic \
    -net "user,guestfwd=:10.0.2.1:22-cmd:netcat 127.0.0.1 22,hostfwd=::2222-:22" \
    -kernel vmlinux-3.16.0-6-powerpc \
    -initrd initrd.img-3.16.0-6-powerpc \
    -append 'root=/dev/sda3' \
    -name 'Debian Linux 8 (jessie) on Power Macintosh G3 (Beige)'

Note that due to issues with the boot loader, a kernel and ramdisk extracted from the installed system are used to start the system.

Linux for PowerPC on QEMU (mac99) - System Information

Linux for PowerPC

Back in the 1990s Apple, IBM and Motorola (Wikipedia) got together and created the PowerPC architecture (Wikipedia), which would be used in IBM's RS/6000 series systems, Apple's Power Macintosh systems and many Motorola products, including desktop computers and embedded processors. Apple's short lived licensing of Macintosh clones during the mid-1990s, Microsoft Windows NT supporting PowerPC (alongside Alpha, MIPS, and x86), and Apple supporting MkLinux development, drove additional interest in the platform and saw production of affordable PowerPC desktop computers.

While IBM would continue development of PowerPC into their 64-bit POWER architecture, Apple had cut-off the Macintosh clone business in 1997, and then Apple switched away from PowerPC in 2006. Leaving a lot of PowerPC based hardware in circulation, with few operating system options remaining.

Linux on PowerPC has a long, and somewhat complex history, with initial work beginning in 1994, the first Linux distributions appearing in 1996, and PowerPC support being integrated in the mainline Linux kernels with Linux 2.2 in 1999. While the PowerPC architecture has been sunset by many distributions, a few remain.

Debian Linux

Debian added support for PowerPC to its Linux distribution in 2000 with the release of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (potato), and while official support for 'powerpc' (32-bit PowerPC and 64-bit big-endian PowerPC) ended in 2020 with Debian 8 (jessie), Debian ports continues to make unstable/testing builds for the 'powerpc' architecture, and has official releases for the 64-bit POWER based systems ('ppc64le').

In the interests of simplicity, reproducibility and ease of comparison, I'm going to use Debian Linux 8 (jessie) for PowerPC, since it has a DVD image available, which means the lack of online repositories won't be a problem and we don't have to consider package version variation.

QEMU

The widespread use of PowerPC processors in computers and embedded systems has driven a need for emulators capable of supporting development and testing for those platforms. The QEMU emulator includes a wide range of processor and system emulations for PowerPC processors, making it a excellent options for these roles at minimal cost.