>> Powermac G5 Quad with Radeon X1900-G5-ed ([...] no lnx)
>I'm surprised that Linux doesn't support this. That's not what I had expected.

Doesn't. At least not out-of-the box. It runs framebuffer with modesetting disabled, but enabling causes 'invalid ROM contents' - it has something to do with Atom bios, which is not present on G5 edition. Standart X1900 cards are reported as working with powerpc linux.

>> For future will be great x64 - here I mean PPC(be)x64 + SMP to utilize
>> todays NG Amigas and old Powermac G5.
>What's "PPC(be)x64"? Some hybrid-ISA CPU yet to be developed? PA6T, P5020 and PPC970 are >PPC64(-BE), no x64 inside. Btw, Tabor/A1222's P1022 is just 32-bit.

It means PPC64 big endian, with fully-64bit/SMP MorphOS on it. For G5, PA6T, P5020/040, T2080 and whatever obscure.

>> Next makes me sense go to PPC(le) - like Talos or Blackbird
>The nice thing about POWER9 is that it can still run in BE mode for legacy compatibility.

yes. And POWER8 also.

>> migration to x86-64 for me means show stopper. [...] what advantage
>> MorphOS have over Win, linux or unix?
>Linux/Unix also run on non-x64 (ARM, Power etc.).

of course, but ARM in general not yet so powerful like x86-64, so there is a gap for MorphOS.
And both ARM and Power are used by enthusiast - also gap for MorphOS.
But in x86-64 world? I don't know - I am not developer or project leader - it is not my decision. But me personally don't have any reason to use MorphOS on standard PC.

Quote:

I wouldn't say since birth. While Commodore was still around it was all about advocacy. Anyone who lives through that era knows that extreme advocacy was not limited to Amiga or Commodore products. C64 owners knew their computer was the best since it was the best selling. Apple II owners knew their computer was best because it was "not a toy". IBM PC computers knew theirs to be the best because IBM was Big Blue. Atari ST knew theirs to be the best because of the due to the MIDI built in. It goes on and on.

Commodore bankrupted and the interwebs was born. That advocacy transferred online. Communities formed in various ways, attempts by companies to revive the "Amiga" were being made. Some real, some bad jokes, and some outright scams. People starting making up their mind what was "teh reals" and what wasn't. Mini camps started forming. People would argue what was a "real Amiga" or not. Some of it in hindsight was pretty silly or stupid, but usually completely harmless.

The problem came a little later. MorphOS started early and had negotiations with McBill's Amiga Inc to become OS4. Those fell through and MorphOS forged on independently. MorphOS was largely seen as a curiosity in these days as there were other similar (though simpler) projects like pOS. It wasn't until McBill contracted Hyperion (a small time game company) to port OS3.1 to PPC and call it OS4 did the ugliness begin.

Pretty soon this game company's laywer started making statements like "MorphOS is based on stolen code", it was "illegal" and he was going to sue the developers. Suddenly there was no simple harmless advocacy, people took red or blue sides on if MorphOS was an illegal pirate product. The red side were the aggressors, the blue side were defending themselves.

That's how it started. It simply got worse with actual lawsuits between companies (not MorphOS though). A certain Belgium lawyer poisoned the well. OS4 is essentially dead with only 3rd parties providing updates, so the war is essentially dead. However, the history helped create the differing paths. People who want to stay niche with "the name" largely stay on the red side. People who want to distance themselves from the name and forge a new path on industry standard hardware, largely go blue.

[ Edited by redrumloa 28.05.2020 - 14:20 ]

> I have learned only recently from Dave Needle (RIP) interviews
> how much of an asshole Jack Tramiel was.

At least this interview (excerpt?) seems to contain more (anecdotal) information about Sam and Leonard than about Jack himself.

> Atom bios [...] is not present on G5 edition.

Yes, I know. I'd have thought the Linux developers had catered to this difference. Pity they didn't.

> fully-64bit/SMP MorphOS on [...] PA6T, [...] T2080

I doubt we'll ever see MorphOS (NG or current gen) on Nemo/X1000. MorphOS on the T2080-based notebook would be nice (if it ever comes).

>>> Next makes me sense go to PPC(le) - like Talos or Blackbird

>> The nice thing about POWER9 is that it can still run in BE mode for legacy compatibility.

> yes. And POWER8 also.

Problem with POWER8 is the lack of a nice and relatively small and affordable desktop/workstation like the Blackbird is for POWER9.

>>> migration to x86-64 for me means show stopper. [...] what advantage
>>> MorphOS have over Win, linux or unix?

>> Linux/Unix also run on non-x64 (ARM, Power etc.).

> ARM in general not yet so powerful like x86-64, so there is a gap for MorphOS.
> And both ARM and Power are used by enthusiast - also gap for MorphOS.

What I meant was that if MorphOS makes no sense on x64 because it runs also Linux, then why should MorphOS make sense on ARM or Power where Linux runs as well?

> Commodore bankrupted and the interwebs was born.

...or rather widespread. The WWW precedes Commodore's bankruptcy.

> MorphOS started early and had negotiations with McBill's Amiga Inc
> to become OS4. [...] MorphOS was largely seen as a curiosity in these
> days as there were other similar (though simpler) projects like pOS.

Development of pOS was abandoned before MorphOS development even started silently and years before first MorphOS beta release. Maybe I'm misinterpreting your implied timeline, but pOS and MorphOS certainly weren't contemporaries.

> this game company's laywer started making statements like
> "MorphOS is based on stolen code", it was "illegal"

Remarkably, this lawyer was also one of the company's managing partners. And let's not forget who really started making those statements and kept on repeating them for at least a decade.

> It simply got worse with actual lawsuits between companies

Interestingly, the only somewhat "blue vs. red" lawsuit (Thendic/Genesi vs. Amiga Inc.) wasn't really about anything red (AmigaOS) or blue (MorphOS), even though the plaintiffs unsuccessfully tried to drag OS4 into this.

> People who want to distance themselves from the name and forge
> a new path on industry standard hardware, largely go blue.

I can only speak for myself, but when I switched from AmigaOS 3.x to MorphOS 1.x, it wasn't to distance myself from the name. It was because I cared less for the name than for the technology and who offered it first. Had negotiations between MorphOS team and Amiga Inc. been successfull, I'd have remained an AmigaOS user :-)

Quote:

Again - important is what makes sense to Morphos-team guys. Not for me. But if you ask:
Have a big sense to have MorphOS for example on my BananaPro or many other small "slow" SBCs. Yes, I have linux here, but.. Lazy, ugly compares to MOS on Pegasos2.
And on Power? Power is Morphos "native" CPU. Talos/Blackbird are powerful modern computers. A1X5k / A1X1k are "new", but not modern. Not mention to Sam460Ex. Nevertheless it was very good job from A-Eon and A-Cube.
When Morphos was borned, there was Pegasos - relatively modern and capable (i.e. not so far behind) these days compares to PC world. What computer can buy new users like gz3fwd?
Btw, I have no problem to install MorphOS even to one lpar on s922 - the day is long an boring sometimes

Sorry for offtopic.

If this can be addressed on both Sam460ex and X5000 then options are opened up.
For the X5000 a PCI Radeon 9xxx card as a simple solution .

Quote:

Quote:

Yup, I mean widespread. Sure the internet has been around far longer, but the form we know of today really started forming in the 94-95 timeframe IMO.


Quote:

Just reading too much into it. I wasn't suggesting they were direct contemporaries, only that people reading about the first reports of MorphOS wouldn't have been shocked. They'd have other examples to compare it to they had heard of that never really materialized. I'm sure you will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think pOS was ever officially announced as dead?

[ Edited by redrumloa 01.06.2020 - 08:42 ]

> people reading about the first reports of MorphOS wouldn't have
> been shocked. They'd have other examples to compare it to they
> had heard of that never really materialized.

The main differences between the pOS pre-release and the first public MorphOS beta release were, from my perspective:
One needed to run on top of AmigaOS while the other didn't (just required Workbench for lack of own graphical program launcher). One couldn't run AmigaOS software while the other could. One was all m68k while the other ran natively on my PowerPC.
To me, these made all the difference between a dead-end curiosity and the beginnings of a viable path to the future.

> I don't think pOS was ever officially announced as dead?

Correct, as with the vast majority of abandoned projects. On the other hand, I've just found a German forum post from 2007 that reports proDAD's information (in reply to an inquiry to allow putting the OS on Aminet) that pOS was a commercially very successful product at that time (2007!). Maybe as an embedded OS? (Edit: Further posts confirm this and speak of industrial use.) We don't know as the planned interview didn't happen, AFAIK.

Btw, fun fact: pOS can run hosted on MorphOS according to this German forum post from MorphOS 1.4.5 era.

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 03.11.2022 - 13:21 ]

Update:

>> Please blame Aeon first for not allowing to have two PCIe cards in X5000 :)

> Dual-booting works on the X5000 with a PCIe x16 GCN-based Radeon card
> in the PEG slot for OS4 and a PCIe x1 R500/R600-based FirePro/FireMV
> card in the PCIe x1 slot for Linux. The question is why MorphOS cannot
> work in this setup when Linux can.

Seems the cause was finally found and fixed within MorphOS:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=13303&forum=3&start=4


Fix released:

"X5000 hardware support was improved to handle two Radeon cards"
https://morph.zone/modules/news/article_storyid_2574.html

"Tweaked the PCI address mapping on the X5000 to accommodate a Radeon on the PCIE1 bus"
https://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.17

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 02.05.2022 - 09:50 ]

I am the OP.
I just stumbled upon the great news that the MorphOS bug preventing a 2nd PCI-E GPU being used has been fixed in 3.17.
Thank you to the developers for fixing this. Now I can have the best of both worlds.
I will be looking for a 1950 XT for MOS to complement the 580 for AOS41.
The 1950 will fit in the Define 7's vertical GPU slot, and with riser should not block other AIC slots on the 5000 motherboard.

I will say my perception from this experience is some of the MOS team comes across as hyper sensitive cry babies. Instead of getting angry at users asking questions and blaming others but not looking in the mirror until now is really sad. Luckily this MOS bug has been fixed and I am personally grateful to the developer(s) who fixed this. Was the bug more complicated than hardcoded expectation of the display adapter being in the x16 slot? Without sources I will never know, but regardless now all x5000 owners in my shoes can now use MorphOS. Well done to whomever fixed it.

Quote:
No good deed goes unpunished.

Quote:

What an unnecessary insulting comment. Totally uncalled for. Where on earth did that come from?

OP gets the fix they wanted and then goes on a rampage attacking the developers.

Boggles the mind...

> Was the bug more complicated than hardcoded expectation
> of the display adapter being in the x16 slot?

At least my impression, which may very well be plain wrong, from the relevant thread (which fell victim to the recent data loss unfortunately) was that bigfoot was easily able to identify the nature of the bug (as his initial hunch in that thread proved true). To me it seemed that it wasn't that hard for him to incorporate the actual fix also.
Assuming that this impression isn't too far from the truth, I must admit I've been somewhat puzzled that it took 4 years of reporting this issue here on MorphZone before it was eventually taken on.

I seem to remember that I did write a somewhat detailed explanation of what the problems were, but it got lost in said data loss. What I don't understand is why some people seem to jump to conclusions, that it was just a matter of flipping a switch, a tiny change to somehow make MorphOS "search" for a graphics card in the right slot, and the MorphOS developers were just too lazy to do this tiny change.

I honestly don't want to go into too many technical details once again, but let me just say that that is not how MorphOS (or any other operating system really) works. Nobody looks for a specific card in a specific slot. The PCI (express) bus(es) get scanned, and then the operating system makes an API available that allows drivers to find cards, usually based on the card's device and vendor IDs. At no point does any specific slot come into this equation.

When it comes to fixing this issue, first you gotta realise that it involves are quite uncommon hardware setup, and not one that is readily available. Initially there was no MorphOS developer who had such a setup, or could create such a setup, without investing in additional hardware.

Fixing this issue spanned a duration of 2.5 weeks. Of course not 2.5 weeks of non-stop work on this issue, but it definitely wasn't a simple matter of just flipping a switch. I did have an initial idea of what the problem was, one I believed I could fix without having access to this setup myself. So I went ahead and did just that, and I enlisted the help of a person here on MorphZone with the prerequisite setup for testing.

It turned out that while my "blind" fix was indeed correct, it wasn't the only problem preventing MorphOS from booting with multiple Radeons installed, and figuring out the remaining problems would take too long without having such a setup myself, so I went out and bought a PCI Express riser card so I could run my own X5000 with two graphics cards. From there on, I identified multiple different problems that all contributed to this problem, and I fixed them all.

All in all, the diff for the cumulative fixes that made MorphOS boot with multiple Radeons in the X5000 is almost 1000 lines long. It was not a simple fix.

> I seem to remember that I did write a somewhat detailed explanation
> of what the problems were, but it got lost in said data loss.

Seems the data loss occurred too soon after you wrote that detailed explanation for me to read it. If I had, my previous comment would surely have come out differently.

> […] It turned out that while my "blind" fix was indeed correct, it wasn't the
> only problem preventing MorphOS from booting with multiple Radeons
> installed […]. From there on, I identified multiple different problems that all
> contributed to this problem, and I fixed them all. All in all, the diff for
> the cumulative fixes that made MorphOS boot with multiple Radeons in the
> X5000 is almost 1000 lines long. It was not a simple fix.

Thank you for the insight.

So can we now boot an X5000 with the two cards and OS4 doesnt choke on having two? I havent tried this and just saw the update supports two cards now. Pretty impressive solution.

What about a 2nd HDD installed with MorphOS on it, will this work out of the box if I put in a 2nd card and replaced the DVD with my MorphOS SATA drive?

[ Edited by Acill 29.05.2022 - 08:58 ]

> can we now boot an X5000 with the two cards and OS4 doesnt choke
> on having two?

Yes, but OS4 still requires its card in the primary slot, else there wouldn't have been any problem as the MorphOS card has always worked in the primary slot and OS4 would have simply used its card in the secondary slot (which it cannot, at least with the primary slot in use).
As is known from running dual-boot OS4/Linux on X5000, OS4 running on the primary card isn't disturbed by a secondary card.

Quote:

The logic is slightly faulty here, and it might be caused by the previous (wrong) speculation. I have no idea if AmigaOS 4 can or cannot boot with its graphics card in a non-primary slot, but in the case of MorphOS, it couldn't boot at all with a Radeon in anything but the primary (x16) slot. At all. It wouldn't even get to the point where it would try to load the Radeon driver.

> I have no idea if AmigaOS 4 can or cannot boot with
> its graphics card in a non-primary slot

IIRC from the discussions over the years, if there're two OS4-compatible graphics cards installed in the X5000, OS4 will always use the one in the primary slot. There's no way to make OS4 ignore the card in the X5000's primary slot and use the (better supported) one in the secondary slot instead (or in addition). This was stated as an unfortunate regression from the X1000 where OS4 can even use two graphics cards concurrently in a dual-GPU setup. I have no idea though about OS4-incompatible graphics cards in the X5000's primary slot as all MorphOS-compatible graphics cards are also OS4-compatible to the extent that OS4 can boot with them.

> MorphOS [...] couldn't boot at all with a Radeon in anything
> but the primary (x16) slot. At all. It wouldn't even get to
> the point where it would try to load the Radeon driver.

Thanks for the clarification. Do I understand the situation right that pre-3.17, MorphOS couldn't even boot with a MorphOS-compatible card in the X5000's primary slot as long as another Radeon (MorphOS-compatible or not) was inserted into the secondary slot?

Yes, you're understanding it right. And technically it didn't specifically have to be a Radeon, but any set of PCI devices with the right set of PCI memory bases could trigger this bug. Radeons in general just do that reliably.

Quote:

Thank you bigfoot for fixing the bug that was preventing myself (and perhaps other x5000 owners) from using MorphOS.

I ordered a 1950 XTX and will order a riser adapter soon.
It is a nice benefit that the 1950 XTX PCB is red, as is the semi-transparent wind tunnel matching the x5000 PCB. My Define has a tinted glass side panel.
Luckily I checked and have a Corsair 750 PSU, as I thought I had put a SF450 in the machine.
Reading up on the cards they both seem to be power hungry.

This is the best of both worlds for me. A ~2006 GPU for MOS, and a ~2018 GPU for AOS-maximizing capabilities on each OS.

Some may not like statement of my impression(s) of the MOS teams response to potential new users and that is OK.
I think it is important the team be told how they interact with their own user base.
Do what you will with this feedback.

Now that this bug has been fixed all x5000 users stand to benefit.