On Jan 26 2021 13:58, Johannes Brakensiek wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I’m thinking of getting a Radeon HD 5770 from a Mac Pro for my PowerMac > 11,2. Did anyone try to this? Are there PPC drivers/firmware that are > going to work with this card? (I know Mac OS X Leopard won’t work with > this, but this mail is not about that. ;)) > > Thank you > Johannes >
If the card doesn't have a Firmware with FCode for the Open Firmware of the Power Mac, it's won't be possible to see anything prior to the Linux boot, where Linux initializes the card using the PC-VideoBIOS. I tried this about 10 years ago with a different Radeon card on a PowerMac3,6 (Mirrored Drive Doors G4, thus only 32-bit) and it worked due to Linux supporting and loading the PC graphics card BIOS correctly. PC graphics cards worked, as I remember it, often better with Linux on PowerPC than Mac video cards would, because Linux support for FCode firmware was always worse than support for the VBIOS version. I remember that loading the PC-VBIOS from a file was sometimes a good solution, so Linux would initialize graphics using the VBIOS way rather than going the Open Firmware path using the native FCode Video-ROM... The problem is that without an FCode graphics ROM you also don't get any error messages, neither from the Open Firmware (like when it doesn't find a bootable operating system: the folder symbol with the question mark in it) or from the early kernel. (early printk) And, as you said, you won't be able to use Mac OS X with it either... Good luck! Linux User #330250
