Consider packaging mesa-amber

[retronica]

Many older powerpc devices will not be supported by the drivers available in plain mesa

From some very limited testing on an iBook G4:

• Once i was able to tame xorg enough to get the system bootable to GUI, i found it was using llvmpipe.
• Compiling mesa-amber from the ABS is possible but :
  • Obviously quite slow.
  • I ended up removing all but my specific needed driver (r200), as compiling for the lot brings in bunch of dependencies i dont need/want.
  • Compiled without LTO as it would presumably have probably taken millenia and all but locked up the laptop when I tried with it enabled.
  • glxgears looks 'funky', but did run (maybe im missing some endianess patches?). inxi reports direct rendering is working.

[kth5]

I've been thinking about it but I do not have any pre-r300 ATI system.

That glxgears is busted is known, it locks up the entire system at times even on r300 and ppc32 with Nvidia Gforce 2 MX. It seems a general issue that has affected mesa-demos with Mesa since at least the 21.x versions. Try fire instead, works quite well on anything oldskool I've tried including my G4s.

Regarding compiling on actual pmac32 hardware, I highly recommend getting at least a dual G5 if not something higher end to build on natively. For ArchPOWER packages are built using a KVM instance running linux-ppc64 in big-endian via cross endian support on a POWER9. There's simply no way we'd get anything done on bare-metal ppc big-endian. :(

I'll have a look at the amber branch and package it to my best efforts but I cannot personally test it.

[kth5]

mesa-amber now in [testing] for powerpc only. (compile time on 8thread 2.7Ghz POWER9 <5m btw)

[kth5]

Package is in [base] now as mentioned. Due to no further activity closing this issue. Feel free to re-open as needed.