As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Workgroup Server line and older cousin to our beloved Apple Network Server. And then I just had to pimp it out for MkLinux. sui generis IBM AIX-based Apple Network Server, one of our favourite machines here at Floodgap, there were the WGSes, the Workgroup Servers, Apple's well-intentioned but conflictingly received line of Macintosh rebadges hopped up with high-spec options and special server software. While certain users had long repurposed desktop Macs as ad-hoc servers, these computers were the first Apple systems explicitly positioned and sold as such, and the first generation was even advertised with A/UX, Apple's own hybrid System V UNIX implementation. Rebuilding the Green Giant Before we get into that, however, I've previously talked at length about Apple's early 1990s server strategy as it pertained to how the Apple Network Server ended up running IBM AIX, though not much about why CEO John Sculley's Apple embarked on a server line in the first place. Likewise, we've said very little about the parallel evolution of the Workgroup Servers and their relationship to the core Macintosh product line. Let's consider those topics now. As an upstart in the age of microcomputers, Apple never had a history of making big iron, and the emergence of its server line can actually be traced back almost directly to the failed Macintosh Office concept. In January 1985, Apple's infamous "Lemmings" ad led its new hardware and peripherals announcement, including the AppleTalk Personal Network (what we now call LocalTalk) to set up multidrop serial links between computers and networked devices, the new LaserWriter printer, and a revamped Lisa 2/10 with more RAM and hard disk space newly subsumed into the Mac fold as the Macintosh XL. For a not completely eye-watering amount of money, Macintoshes could talk amongst themselves and send jobs to a high-quality shared printer, with network file storage on the XL's 10MB "Widget" hard disk to come shortly and support for suitably equipped PCs to follow. Steve Jobs, then both chairman of the board and veep of the Macintosh division, confidently predicted 10,000 Macintosh Office networks by the end of the year. While the LaserWriter started at $6995 [$21,750 in 2026 dollars], the refreshed Lisa, er, Macintosh XL now started at a surprisingly competitive $3995 [$12,450], some $6000 less. However, the dirty little secret was that the Macintosh XL was only supposed to be a stopgap, a way to both slowly wind down the hardware and also buy time pending the real Macintosh Office centrepiece: Jobs' new leap forward, the "Big Mac." Big Mac had many vague ideas associated with it, though most of them converged on it being a file server or high-end workstation running some sort of Unix, possibly with the Macintosh interface layered on top. As such, being the most powerful machine in the constellation, it couldn't help but be fated for a central role in the new Macintosh Office. Later in design it was also internally known as the "3M" project, because it would generate at least a megapixel display (its most famous surviving mockup even put it in portrait orientation), provide at least a megabyte of memory, and run at least a million instructions per second on the new 68020. Unfortunately for John Sculley, the company grossly underestimated the XL's appeal at its new lower price. What Apple expected to sell in eighteen months sold in three, emptying the parts inventory so rapidly that Sculley was forced to end its availability in April with Big Mac and its software still stuck in development. ("Apple's strategy may have been too good," mused InfoWorld.) Neither could Apple keep up with demand for the LaserWriter, becoming deeply backordered from manufacturing delays and only shipping 2,500 printers by June. Third-party products ended up filling the gaps, including networking hardware from 3Com and the Centram TOPS file sharing suite. Meanwhile, the Apple board, increasingly concerned about Jobs' excesses in his dual role, ordered Sculley to contain him, after which Jobs was cashiered in May and departed in September. Now in practical ruins, even though Apple promised all shipping products would remain available, the Macintosh Office initiative was officially shut down the same month. sensu stricto was so identified with Jobs internally that it became a political liability in the wake of his precipitous exit. For his part, new Mac product manager Jean-Louis Gassée considered it a "toy" and wasted little time officially canning it, instead promoting the Milwaukee project which had been quietly launched without Jobs' knowledge to create the future Macintosh II. Consequently, Apple's image began to suffer with corporate consumers as they lost confidence in the company's suitability for large office deployments. Sculley addressed this perception head-on at the 1986 introduction of the Macintosh Plus, telling attendees, "I know the real commitment from business customers must be earned by meeting customer needs, by living up to expectations and by keeping promises. We intend to do all of that." The legacy of Big Mac nevertheless persisted in the Macintosh II's development, which at one point was even codenamed "Little Big Mac," and AppleShare's tardy arrival in January 1987 finally made a basic server platform possible. At launch AppleShare was targeted at any Macintosh Plus with sufficient external storage, though in initial versions a machine chosen for server duty had to be all but completely dedicated to the task. Introduced in March, the Mac II, compatible with the new AppleShare as well, would subsequently go on to largely achieve the 3M project's aims. System 7's impending development continued in the background, Apple added X11 support as an option in part to address these and other deficiencies in the graphical interface. "Our first goal was to do a solid Unix," argued Michael J. Homer, technical markets director. A/UX 2.0, introduced in 1990 before System 7's rollout, made good on the majority of Apple's promises: most 32-bit clean applications could now run under a new compatibility layer, MultiFinder was supported, and Macintosh, command line and X11 applications were finally able to coexist on one screen. It was exceptionally well-received by reviewers and users alike, with MacUser approvingly calling it "the most interesting and impressive software to have come out of Apple since HyperCard." Subsequently in July 1991, after System 7's May launch, Apple and IBM announced their new partnership around the PowerPC and a future AIX incorporating the Mac Toolbox. In November this idea was broadened into the future A/UX 4.0, with Apple introducing the System 7-based A/UX 3.0 at the same time. (Another, less-well-known alternative also emerged around this period, but we'll talk about that later when we discuss the history of MkLinux.) hardware, and Macs pressed into server duty in those days were otherwise just Macs. One I particularly remember as an undergraduate at the University of California San Diego was an SE/30 (userserve.ucsd.edu) down in the AP&M B337 lab, running AppleShare version something-or-other and an unknown Gopher server that we all accessed for software resources. I was fortunately able to save its contents before it was decommissioned, since it could still be accessed off-campus at the time. As such, Apple management concluded their persistent lack of a turnkey server configuration was harming additional institutional uptake. At Mactivity '92, the Enterprise Services Division (what would become Apple's Server Group) quizzed attendees for desired features; respondents nearly unanimously favoured high-end hardware on a Unix platform. Fortunately, Apple now credibly had one. In March 1993 the company announced the first Macintoshes to officially be called servers: the Workgroup Server 60, Workgroup Server 80 (collectively codenamed "Blugu") and Workgroup Server 95 ("Chinook"). came with A/UX 3.0.1, a requirement of the included high-performance PDS SCSI and L2 cache (128K to 512K) card, plus an optional 200-seat AppleShare Pro license for file and print services (a separate configuration targeted databases, with Oracle 7 specifically mentioned). In fact, when the demo machine reportedly got stolen shortly before Mactivity93, product manager Marv Su had to "make one" out of a Quadra 950 and a spare card to show to attendees. An optional tray could carry up to five internal hard disks, sitting on top of the system's drive shelf. While the AWS 95 could still run System 7, the PDS SCSI/L2 card was only fully supported in A/UX, and blocked one of the five NuBus slots when installed. The other two systems came with a 50-seat AppleShare 4.0 license and System 7.1, and both the AWS 95 and the AWS 80 had optional built-in DDS (DAT) tape backup. The 60 and 80 launched two months after the 95 in June; Apple started the three systems at $3079, $6399 and $7589 [$7150, $14,850 and $17,600] respectively. The most expensive AWS 95 loadout had 48MB of RAM, a 230MB and a 1GB disk drive, DDS-1 tape and 512K of L2 cache, and sold for $12,929 [$30,000]. itself was the operating system. This port was variously codenamed "Wormhole" and/or "Deep Space Nine," borrowing code from the existing IBM AIX port of Portable NetWare — AIX was PowerOpen too, after all — but modified to run via System 7; Wormhole would then run on the new high-end server, codenamed "Green Giant," using the fastest PowerPC 601 then available in a Quadra 950-style case. Novell NetWare was, of course, the premier network operating system of the early 1990s, but many believed it was already on a slow decline, and the overwhelmingly negative reaction Wormhole provoked from testers who still preferred Unix caught the Enterprise Services Division off guard. Spindler remained doggedly convinced NetWare was the way forward, but as it was imperative the PowerPC server reach market with or shortly after the desktop Power Macintosh, at least initially Green Giant would have to be System 7 — any other options could come later. (As we'll discuss.) 2GB drives and 24MB of RAM. You could also get a 9150 logic board to install in a Quadra 900 or Quadra 950 or, for that matter, an AWS 95, and it would fit your physical case if not your use case (if you were using A/UX). The rebuild came when it started getting flaky last year and intermittently crashing, but the RAM tested good and replacing the boot disk didn't make it better. Since these early 601s can run a little warm, I next redid the heat grease with proper modern compound to see if that would help, and it didn't. While my personal experience has been that these systems don't universally have the bad capacitors that '030 Macintoshes and their contemporaries (e.g., the Macintosh Portable) do, others have reported bad caps on their own early Power Macs, so that was the last thing to try. I sent the board off to Garrett Bunge for a professional recap, who reported there might have been a tiny bit of leakage, but either way it came back looking great. We'll come back to the history when we get to our choices of operating system. Let's first get it back together, starting with the bare case. the PowerBook 1400. this post explains how Apple's serial numbers worked at the time). additional 50-pin header at J9 with no markings. This port is yet another holdover from the Quadra 900, the first Macintosh to implement a separate internal SCSI bus, and later duplicated on the Q950 and AWS 95. On these machines the internal SCSI is a separate second bus from the external SCSI, but there are internal headers for both busses so that internal devices can be on either bus. The 9150 still has this feature and thus still has a port in the same place to handle upgrading machine configurations that need it, but it was officially undocumented and its use otherwise discouraged, and any internal devices connected to J9 will be on the slower CURIO. We won't be using it here. some sort of upgrade pathway, either through their CPU slot or (in this case) as a PDS card, with the notorious exception of the Power Macintosh 7200, 8200 and Workgroup Server 7250 for which Sonnet eventually produced a PCI card to carry a G3. with nothing installed at all. In fact, according to Apple's own tech note, the PDS terminator was only ever intended and shipped with the WGS 8150 and 9150, and it cautions these systems will not work without one if the Processor Direct Slot is empty. the musical sting! (These Power Macs do not make a Mac "bong.") I then got out my customized Mac OS 8.6 boot CD — I prefer 8.6 on Macs on beige pre-G3 Macs without an upgrade card — and put it in the optical drive, and got a Happy Mac! But was it stable? Let's burn it in before we go further with this process. Power Mac 6500 has a 1MB cache, I left it there because that machine is intended primarily as a BeOS box and BeOS doesn't support L2 G3 upgrades, whereas we might be able to dual boot with a G3 in this one even if MkLinux won't support it. (Note from the future: this can work.) not to mess around with the NuBus, PDS or cache slots without unplugging the machine, even if the key is turned to off — there's apparently some trickle power even in the fully-off key position. With the plug out I switched (with difficulty) the ROM into the top slot and put one of the 256K cache sticks in the bottom one. For storage, next we'll prep the ZuluSCSI. I got out a new SD card and created three disk images: a 4GB disk image exclusively for Mac OS (as HFS+), a 4GB disk image for MkLinux (as ext2), and a 1GB image to be partitioned into MkLinux swap and an HFS (not HFS+) exchange partition, since the HFS toolkit included with MkLinux only understands original HFS. We'll need this exchange partition for building custom kernels, since the kernel is booted from the Mac OS side. I chose to make smaller individual devices rather than carving up a larger disk into LUNs simply for ease of organization; the SCSI emulator doesn't really care one way or the other, and I can also separately back the image files up. MkLinux, or, Linux at Mach 3 At this point we'll configure the machine to dual-boot MkLinux, so let's talk some more backstory before we do. the NuBus-compatible version has survived. Because of the age of its System file, the 9150 ironically can't boot from this only known build. (Photo credit, Joe Pugliese, Associated Press.) arresting crimson prototype board complete with populated debug header, additional test points and a silkscreened train logo.) All three PowerPC Workgroup Servers now came with 16MB of base RAM plus System 7.5 and AppleShare 4.1, the 6150 and 8150 got smaller speed bumps of their own to 66MHz and 110MHz, and Apple's software RAID remained supported. software strategy was becoming. PowerOpen-A/UX 4-AIX and Taligent-Pink were still shambling around Cupertino development hell, causing Apple in May 1994 to embark upon an alternative stepwise approach in the form of Copland. Meanwhile, despite claims of Cyberpunk's continued progress, at the April 1995 refresh Spindler had little other choice than to double down on then-current Mac OS with the Apple Internet Server Solution. AISS had the distinct stench of a product assembled under duress, nothing more than a cobbled-together bundle of largely pre-existing software shipped with your choice of Workgroup Server, though the software would of course run on any Power Mac. Other than MacDNS, which wasn't even finished when AISS was launched, plus AppleSearch and "player" versions of HyperCard and FileMaker Pro, everything else was third-party: WebSTAR for server software, Bare Bones' BBEdit as an HTML editor, Adobe Acrobat Pro as, uh, Adobe Acrobat, Netscape Navigator and Everywhere Butler SQL. Apple threw in CGI support for AppleSearch and templates for web pages to be customized. AISS' spec sheet promised even the wimpiest 6150 could handle 3,000 to 5,000 connections per hour (how cute!) and more still was possible by using MacDNS for round-robin load balancing against multiple redundant Workgroup Servers. However, there was one Workgroup Server that couldn't run AISS: the AWS 95. Even as Shiner was supposed to be Apple's next big Unix box, the company seemed to outright repudiate its previous Unix efforts, explicitly claiming that "you don't need to be a Unix nerd" to use a Mac server. The AWS 95 was quietly cancelled in October 1995 at nearly the same time as the collapse of Cyberpunk, marking the end of Apple's inexplicable flirtation with NetWare. With the recognition that A/UX 4 might never ship, Shiner was retrofitted to run standard AIX 4.1 with Apple's extensions, yielding our beloved Apple Network Server in January 1996. Unfortunately for Spindler, Apple's finances were thoroughly in the weeds by then, and his announcement of further staff and model cuts was too much for shareholders who hastily replaced him with Gil Amelio in February. However, the Network Server, defiantly no Macintosh, turned out to be not the only Unixy thing at Apple then either. In 1989 Apple bought out Coral Software in Cambridge, MA (not Corel), developer of Allegro Common Lisp for the Mac, as part of an initiative for new programming paradigms on the Macintosh but also the Newton PDA. The deal involved Coral's team joining Apple's Advanced Technology Group at a new ATG lab to be established there, and Ike Nassi, a veteran engineer and scientist at DEC and part of the initial team at Encore Computer Corporation, was recruited to Apple by then-Newton chief Larry Tesler to run it. Initially Nassi managed the Dylan programming language (at the time written in Macintosh Common Lisp and originally intended for, but never used by, the Newton) and Sculley's Knowledge Navigator passion project before Apple software VP Dave Nagel asked him to move west in 1993 to assist with the software division. Nassi started as VP of development tools, his portfolio notably containing MacApp and the Macintosh Programmers' Workshop, but less than a year later was asked to take over the operating system group. As the PowerPC transition progressed, Nassi became concerned by efforts to build the Common Hardware Reference Platform, believing it would stunt the growth of the Power Macintosh, and positively alarmed by the growing debacle around Copland's infamous NuKernel core, which he said later to the Computer History Museum "was just not going to fly." pairs of National Semiconductor NS32032-family processors. (At my first job out of college, the HP 9000-K250 I was hired to work on had recently replaced what I think was a Multimax.) In fact, Apple already had experience with the Mach microkernel in the form of MacMach, a 1991 CMU research prototoype which ran 68K System 7 as a virtualized task under Mach parallel with its 4.3BSD-derived operating system core — not unlike Classic under Mac OS X many years later, and not to be confused with MachTen, a separate commercial effort from Tenon Intersystems developed independently from CMU or Apple, which runs Mach as a task under Mac OS. MacMach was the product of a joint effort to allow programs from CMU's Andrew Project distributed environment to run directly on the Macintosh II, and Apple provided both financial support and source code from System 7 to aid in development. Notwithstanding the impressive technology, however, MacMach's potential was unavoidably limited. Its reliance on the 4.3BSD codebase incurred the strict requirement that users hold a valid AT&T Unix source code license, all but ensuring it could never be a plausible alternative, let alone threat, to A/UX; and like A/UX, it was never directly ported to PowerPC, condemning it to obsolescence. In the time since, Nagel had moved to VP of engineering; Nassi, who succeeded him as head of the software division, convinced Nagel in August 1995 that resurrecting the concept might pay off. The idea was controversial within Apple, especially with Macintosh division head Howard Lee, who believed it would maroon the Macintosh if IBM considered Mach's highly portable nature as evidence Apple wasn't committed to PowerPC. Lee's fear was not without reason: Spindler previously had to cancel the System 7 port to Intel (i.e., the Star Trek project, instigated by Novell) as a potential threat to the alliance, and of course Project Marklar much later directly led to Apple indeed leaving PowerPC in 2006. Becaue of the internal political ramifications, the PowerPC Mach group initially had few staff resources and operated in near-secrecy for many months. Brett Halle, then manager of the kernel team, suggested to Nassi that a Linux port, modifying the Linux kernel to run as a task under Mach, could demonstrate the microkernel's viability. It even had an obvious name: MkLinux. With Nassi's blessing, Halle quietly sponsored a small team from the Open Software Foundation's Grenoble, France office to begin both the Mach port work and the Linux kernel conversion to run under it. OSF had extensive experience with Mach dating back to their 1989 use of Mach 2.5 as the basis of OSF/1 ("osfmk," intended also as part of the foundation of A/UX 4.0) but this team operated separately, later with a single part-time Apple engineer. The host machines used for initial development were both x86 PCs running regular Linux and HP 9000/700 PA-RISC workstations with OSF/1, with the x86 hosts migrated to an MkLinux port of their own as a self-hosting alpha test. PowerPC objects were cross-compiled using gcc 2.7.1, with cross-platform debugging with gdb over a serial port. For simplicity of development, the Linux task ran under OSF MK as a single monolithic server, though the developers admitted this wouldn't be an ideal system design for a Mach-based platform. The group's rapid progress impressed Nassi, and shortly before the first Developer Release in May 1996 he made the effort official as Apple's "Leveraged Technologies Group." Using the new kernels with tools and pieces previously ported by Thomas and others on top of a modified Red Hat distro, MkLinux DR1 CDs were finished, pressed and handed out, complete with source code, to WWDC attendees that year. The LTG represented Apple's first official attempt to support an open-source software project, and within six months had increased to seven members, five at Apple and two at OSF. An important consequence of its isolated development, however, was its limited hardware support. Apple had since moved from NuBus to PCI with the introduction of the Power Macintosh 9500 in June 1995, and the Workgroup Server line subsequently followed suit. In February 1996 Apple introduced the Workgroup Server 7250 (derived from the Power Macintosh 7200), using the same 120MHz 601+ as the 9150/120, and the first Workgroup Server to use a 604, the 132MHz Workgroup Server 8550 (from the Power Macintosh 8500), along with an updated AISS 2.0 — at which point the 6150, 8150 and 9150 were all discontinued, though the new AISS would still run on them. But, because the LTG had only developed on NuBus Macs, DR1 only officially ran on the 6100, 7100, and 8100 (plus Power Computing's clone Power 100 family), all of which had also been discontinued by the time DR1 emerged. Not even the NuBus PowerPC Workgroup Servers officially appeared in the support list, though of course it would run on them too. As the distribution files were large downloads for the era, partner Prime Time Freeware produced pressed CD-ROMs for a nominal cost. replaced by DR2 in September 1996, primarily a bug-fix and performance release, which in turn was used to supplement an early direct port of the Linux kernel (then called linux-pmac) to PCI Power Macs. For his part, Nassi was pleased with MkLinux's promising launch. However, without a compatibility pathway it could not be an obvious successor to Mac OS, and while Nassi had plans for running the Mac OS under this "PowerPC MacMach" as 68K MacMach did, that goal was never achieved. Nassi quietly disagreed with Gil Amelio's pursuit of Jean-Louis Gassée's BeOS, believing Mach to be the superior platform, and left Apple in November 1996 before Apple's acquisition of Steve Jobs' NeXT — itself of course powered by a Mach-based OS, as is its descendant, modern macOS. MkLinux nevertheless progressed further at Apple after his departure. DR2.1 was announced in March 1997 as the first release to itself run on both NuBus and PCI systems, supporting the 601 and 604 CPUs in the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100, 8100 and 7200, 7500, 7600, 8200, 8500, and 9500. Prime Time duly released CDs of these as well and Apple dubbed 2.1 the "Reference Release," sponsoring Prime Time and editor Rich Morin to release a book-and-CD kit with the tree from January 1997, just before the official announcement. The x86 and PA-RISC ports were also made available (since they already existed), though of course OSF MK could run on many more architectures than that. On the other hand, the Apple Network Server, at the time Apple's only true-Unix machines, never ran it. Cyberdog and OpenDoc and terminate further development of the Network Server, and MkLinux was just as vulnerable because in Jobs' mind it had already achieved its maximal corporate utility: OSF and the LTG had done most of the work porting the microkernel, and with NeXTSTEP's ready BSD foundation Apple had no further need of Linux. Apple disbanded the LTG and transferred control to the community MkLinux Developers Association in 1998 for the release of DR3 in July, by which point MkLinux could run on nearly every four-digit Power Macintosh (now explicitly including the Workgroup Servers) and even early beige G3 models, plus the PowerBook 3400 and the Kanga PowerBook G3. (Apple had since abandoned the 620, which had become hot, expensive, and increasingly surpassed by the cheaper 604 family. Notably, although the 750/G3 completely outclassed it as well, the G3 did so with some features introduced in the 620 like backside L2 cache.) In those days the website was reportedly even hosted on an 80MHz 7100 for some period of time, and allegedly other PowerBooks like the 5300 could boot it also. Mac-specific device support lagged, however, and the project's lack of resources combined with the continual need for Mach-specific changes to the Linux kernel slowed progress further during Apple's transition to the New World Mac. R1 was released in December 1999 and the final release, "pre-R2" (but basically R2 and that's what I'm going to call it), was closed out in August 2002. Although the MkLinux website remains up and accessible today, no new official work on it was subsequently done, and the direct LinuxPPC port replaced it as the de facto Linux basis for Power Macintoshes and the Network Server. Given that complicated tale you might well wonder why we're even bothering with MkLinux at all, especially since non-Mach Linux also eventually supported NuBus Power Macs, including the 9150. The reason is simply historicity: it was the only official "Apple Linux," the only Linux distribution Apple had a direct hand in developing, the only Unixy thing of any kind Apple even vaguely supported on any PowerPC Workgroup Server, and for years was the only Linux that could run on the NuBus ones. With the weight of that behind it and me being a history nerd first and foremost, I never considered running anything else. Before Brinton's freakout and rebuild, I had MkLinux "pre-R2" on it, so now that we're starting fresh we'll hopefully learn from those mistakes I made the first time (at least, if I can remember them). /home and one for everything else in /. Since we want to do this precisely, we'll click Custom. from the Internet Archive or a Garden of other Macintosh sites. The R2RC5 CD also contains components for the contemporary release of LinuxPPC, but it doesn't run on the 9150, so we will not discuss it further in this article. MkLinux-install folder are multiple pieces to copy to your main Mac OS volume's system folder (to the Control Panels, Extensions and Preferences folders). A booter extension (named, oddly enough, MkLinux Booter) is used to launch the Mach kernel portion before the rest of Mac OS loads. This kernel is stored on the Mac filesystem, not the Linux one. The MkLinux control panel is used to pick the boot default, either Linux or Mac OS. The MkLinux Booter extension understands LILO configuration files and one is provided. Open lilo.conf from your Preferences folder after you've copied it. Alternatively, you can click the Custom... button in the MkLinux CDEV. rootdev=/dev/scd0 line is uncommented, and no other rootdev= lines are specified. If you have multiple possible CD-ROM drives or emulated CDs available, you may need to change this number. The other important part of this file is the mach_options= line, down at the bottom. These are the command line arguments passed to Mach. Despite the -v option shown there prominently, which would be expected to trigger a verbose boot, pretty much any boot is verbose in MkLinux. We'll have another use for this field when we get to our upgrades. scri (technically a WorldScript extension, but otherwise loadable as a "regular" extension), not INIT, which causes it to load before other INITs and CDEVs without resorting to trickery like putting a whole lot of spaces before the name. BootX uses the same method. The window here is as close to an About box as you'll get for MkLinux. The staff list appears to date from just before the disbanding of the LTG: from Apple, Brett Halle, Michael Burg, Vicki Brown, Gilbert Coville and Eryk Vershen, and from OSF Research Institute, Nick Stephen, F. Barbou des Places, Éamonn McManus and Gary Thomas. Notice that in this screen booting MkLinux is the default. The default choice is set in the MkLinux control panel. Regardless of what the default actually is, press RETURN to accept it, and ESC to accept the other option. COLOR line when specifying the video console, and compare it with this: COLOR line appears, with the same colours in the same order, and almost certainly descends from the same block of code. Apple implied as much in the December 2000 Kernel Environment documentation, saying, "Other parts of the system software, such as Mach, are based on technology previously used in Apple’s MkLinux project, in Mac OS X Server, and in technology acquired from NeXT." This particular message disappeared in 10.3 as there was no need to specifically call out the console as colour by then. default_pager), the virtual memory manager, is started next. The bootstrap loads the Linux kernel as the next task, which should start from its initrd and finally enter the installer. Unfortunately, at this point we got no more messages from the MkLinux Mach kernel and the 9150 completely ground to a halt. A brief moment of panic ensued because MkLinux used to work. Was the machine shot after all? After I got the conniption out of my system, I thought a little more carefully and realized that this new 9150 configuration was not the same as the old 9150 configuration: we have a ZuluSCSI, and we have approximately double the RAM. I could believe the ZuluSCSI was at fault if we were booting from it, but we were booting from the same CD-ROM I installed MkLinux from before, so that possibility seemed unlikely. That left pulling out half the RAM SIMMs. can do that much without having to disassemble the machine again to get the power supply out. It's putting the SIMMs back in that's the fun part, but right now we just have to make sure this can work. larger fifth free region. gcc 2.95.2 (I don't know where the line noise came from there, and I don't know why it says "hello"). The initrd then transfers control to the Red Hat installer, without using systemd, which we shall consider a feature. I ignored them, anyway. mac-us-std suffices. second volume on /dev/sdb. The two 2GB partitions we created are /dev/sdb3 and /dev/sdb4, which the MkLinux installer has treated as "Linux native." We move to /dev/sdb3 and select Edit. /dev/sdb3 will be /, so we provide that path and select OK. /dev/sdb4 will be /home. / and /home formatted, but we needn't check for bad blocks on them either, and select OK once again. / and /home are created, the packages are scanned ... glibc provided is 2.1.3. dreadfully slow, and the weak onboard video does it absolutely no favours. I recall finding AfterStep (ah, the irony), also included, more tolerable. Admittedly, Apple didn't really intend the 9150 to be a workstation and as such we're not going to struggle with it this time around, but we may possibly do so in a future article. brinton.floodgap.com. lilo.conf in the Mac side's Preferences folder to now point to the new root on /dev/sdb3. I have never tried this with an HFS file system, but it cannot mount (let alone write to) an HFS+ file system, so we'll need to do that on the 8.6 side afterwards. lilo.conf as instructed (from Preferences, or by clicking Custom...), and then restart the Mac. fsck since for some reason the installer did not cleanly unmount the root filesystem. Apple's Linux, after all, even though it was recently removed from the modern Linux kernel — and SMB services. If you had period clients, this could definitely have been your file server, and that would have been an absolutely appropriate purpose for the 9150. brinton:/home/spectre/% uname -a Linux brinton.floodgap.com 2.0.38-osfmach3 GENERIC_09 #9 Tue Mar 7 10:51:13 PST 2000 ppc unknown brinton:/home/spectre/% gcc -v Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/ppc-yellowdog-linux/2.95.4/specs gcc version 2.95.4 20010319 (prerelease/franzo/20011204) brinton:/home/spectre/% ls -l /mach_servers total 3615 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1349896 Jan 7 2001 Mach_Kernel -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 119033 Jan 7 2001 Mach_Kernel.map -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 131314 Apr 19 2000 System.map -r--r--r-- 1 root root 123 Feb 22 1998 bootstrap.conf -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 205690 Jan 7 2001 default_pager -r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 257371 Feb 22 1998 mach_init -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1614475 Apr 19 2000 vmlinux Sing it with me: Startup, shutdown, startup, shutdown, swiftly fly the rc files ...) Pimp My Green Giant Ride We have now returned to the functionality of our prior configuration: we can dual-boot MacOS and Linux. However, with motherboard video, the baseline CPU, half its maximum RAM, and half the L2 cache it originally shipped with, right now it's not a particularly strong performer in either operating system. Of course, the set of what upgrades are supported in Mac OS 8.6 is rather larger than the set of what upgrades are supported in MkLinux R2. For example, while G3 upgrades are available for the PDS connector in NuBus Power Macs and generally work well in Mac OS, most of them don't work in MkLinux, and MkLinux doesn't support NuBus video cards either. There is also the matter of that 128MB of RAM we had to remove that we would like back. Ideally, with these plastics continuing to crumble, we would like to find a maximal configuration suitable for both operating systems that can be changed through software as needed, rather than having to keep opening it up. MkLinux FAQ-O-Matic has somewhat conflicting information about which CPU upgrade cards work where and how, though the various reports do seem to agree that Sonnet cards won't work at all. On the other hand, while one reporter indicated success with a Newer Technology MAXpowr G3, I'm not entirely confident in his recollection because despite being a PDS card he said it displaced the L2 cache. The MAXpowr G3 PDS also lists the 6150 and 8150 but not the 9150 as compatible, even though the PDS connectors are the same; there may be a form factor limitation. But the 9150 is specifically listed as compatible for the Sonnet G3, and Sonnets are much more common. As long as the Sonnet extension loads after the MkLinux Booter extension, the upgrade card should remain inactive, and MkLinux can run unmolested on the 601 (we can leave the L2 cache stick in, even). For the Mac OS, we can use the G3 there. As it happens, I have a couple spare G3 cards in the stock closet and this seems like the perfect time to put one in service. the Power Mac car crash sound (further yelling censored). After unplugging it, pulling the G3 completely and putting the PDS terminator back in, I got the normal startup chime and a normal boot, so I put the G3 back in. This time it booted as well. (It also appears that the PDS terminator is not needed in this card; it seems to terminate the bus just fine by itself.) actual system bus is not doubled, which is to say that any bus access these CPUs make could stall depending on whether it corresponds to the real bus clock. These cards therefore must have a crapload of cache to smooth such gaps out, and indeed both of these fastest cards have a full 1MB of backside L2. The backside cache bus runs at double the system bus speed, but the cache is on the doubled "local" bus, so the cache speed is effectively 4x the system bus. The 9150/80 here is a 40MHz bus system, meaning the G3 card's local bus runs at 80MHz, the backside cache at 160MHz, and the CPU at a 5x multiplier for the full 400MHz. Even if I hunted down a 500MHz G3, and while I'm crazy I'm not made of money here, I would only see 480MHz on this system (6x multiplier). Sonnet's Metronome faithfully reports all these numbers, but Apple System Profiler doesn't know about the doubled "local" bus, so it erroneously thinks the CPU is only 200MHz. scri, then inserting spaces and/or changing its filename to sort above it. INIT to load it later. That way we can continue to boot MkLinux normally on the 601 (with the motherboard L2 cache, which we never removed), yet still enjoy the benefits of the G3 — and it is much snappier — in Mac OS 8.6. an -m option that caps the amount of RAM Mach will use. You pass it on the mach_options= line in lilo.conf, e.g., mach_options=-m136. To test this, we'll need to install the full 264MB. With some difficulty you can worm the SIMMs back in without removing the power supply. However, that also knocked the board back into the interrupt and reset switches again, and the second time around was not much more reassuring. Too much memory was apparently a significant problem in some configurations of MkLinux, and values that work for booting the installer for testing purposes may not necessarily work for an installation (for example, I tried -m200, and while this worked for the installer it could not start the kernel installed on the ZuluSCSI image). A cursory look at the Mach kernel source suggests that there is a hard upper limit on the number of VM hash buckets and when this overflows, the kernel goes into never-never land. -m191 seemed to be the highest value that would work either way, but I left it at -m136 since that was the RAM amount that we started with and that I knew was reliable. I was now pretty thoroughly irked by the problem with the front switches and decided I needed to do something about that. carefully at low speed. mostly stable. will use the Velcro straps to neaten everything up. I put the SCSI cable's excess length into the bottom compartment of the hard disk tray. much they wouldn't work. In my parts bin is a Radius PrecisionColor Pro 24XK. The reason I marked the name on it is that the 24X, 24XK and 24XP are closely related and can be hard to distinguish visually. From my experience the highest-end 24X has all 12 RAM chips along the top instead of the 11-1 arrangement here on the 24XK and 24XP. Another difference appears to be the speed of the Brooktree Bt473 RAMDAC, which is the silkscreened number at the end of the chip identifier (the 24X is 110MHz, this 24XK is 80MHz and the 24XP is 66MHz). Kan's page claims it does, so I just have to push it. This card has both composite video in and out as well as a conventional Mac DA-15 video port. Although the card is slower than the HPV card, it has 2MB of VRAM and correspondingly more colour depth and resolutions, so it's worth giving a shot. as directed and installed it that direction in the middle NuBus slot. It still needed some squeezing to make it and may have nailed the frame around the NuBus slots, but it fits. a future article and see if any hacks in the kernel are possible to improve the situation. If not, at least we'll have fun exploring the infrastructure. The Workgroup Servers did not survive the axe of Jobs either: after the 7250 and 8250, the last Macintosh systems to bear the Workgroup Server name were the Workgroup Server 7350 and Workgroup Server 9650 in April 1997, which were cancelled less than a year later in March 1998. With the introduction of the beige G3, the "Workgroup Server" brand was retired for the "Macintosh Server G3," which encompassed both the beige mini-tower in March 1998 and later the "Yosemite" Blue and White G3 in January 1999. Apple did not reintroduce bespoke server hardware to their product line until the rackmount Xserve G4 in 2002, which survived in G5 and Intel-based incarnations until 2011 when they were cancelled — per Jobs — "because hardly anyone was buying them"; a 2009 server version of the Intel Mac mini, in some ways a spiritual descendant of the Workgroup Servers, was itself cancelled in 2014. Even though there are still lots of Macs in offices, to date no official server hardware has ever returned to Apple's product line-up since.

Reports coming in of the death of John C. Dvorak, apparently passed away on Monday (July 20th) from complications of heart bypass surgery. Dvorak started in wine and moved to silicon as an early columnist at InfoWorld, one of the pillar references for this particular blog because of its studious regular reporting, and most notably for PC Magazine where he had no less than two columns since at least 1986. In addition to this and other tech journalism credits, he was on the flagship CNET Central cable TV program in the mid 1990's with his "Buy It, Try It, Skip It" reviews, plus other shows hosted on NPR and then-ZDTV. He was also a regular guest on Leo LaPorte's syndicated radio program and podcasts, and joined former MTV veejay Adam Curry (well known to us in Gopherspace for MTV Networks v. Curry, and an early user of TTYtter before Twitter started to suck) in 2007 as co-host of the No Agenda podcast, a role he maintained until his death. Dvorak hailed from a different generation of tech journalists, far more personal and yet far more technical, and even his detractors (given his political views, which we won't talk about here, there are many) would admit he was at least entertaining. He was 80. Rest in peace.

Some of our recent (and some upcoming) projects are oriented to systems with serial consoles, but it's been getting pretty old dragging around old CRT terminals or tying up Mac laptops with a serial port. I'd like something that's self-contained, a little more portable and a bit less heavy. I'm sure there's any number of all-in-one setups you can buy to do this, but I'm cheap, so I'm going to DIY it. from 2004 to 2014, so it's almost on-topic for this blog, even. I chose it because it was a little banged up and the LCD had some areas of damage (probably improperly closed on something), and the seller had priced it accordingly, but the screen was still sufficiently legible and the keyboard looked fine. Naturally you can do mostly what we're doing here with any of the similar Dell or HP or etc. units that can also be easily found. an UltraNav, the fact it gives you a choice of pointing device is rather nice: if you like TrackPoints (I don't hate them), you can use that, or if you prefer trackpads (I don't hate them either but I'd rather use the TrackPoint), you can use that. The keyboard and UltraNav are implemented as HIDs on a single hub which also offers two more USB ports. fine." Like I say, there was some damage, probably because it got closed improperly on something and messed up the display, but it's sufficient as a simple terminal or here connected to the M1 MacBook Air with a USB-C dongle. you need to do is pick what is the most convenient for you and has the right features. There are slightly more such devices which use a PS/2 port, but I decided to stick with USB since it would be more flexible and if I really needed something else, I could use an active converter like a ps2x2pico for PS/2 or a Wombat for Macs with ADB. I eventually selected this one from Tattler Solutions (not affiliated) because it ships from the United States (damn you UPS, you still owe me $600 on that tariff you stiffed me on), comes in a nice self-contained case and can be USB-powered, runs up to 115200bps, and has demonstrably good VT100 terminal support. All up it cost me $86 shipped. However, it also has a big drawback: its USB controller does not support combo devices like our IBM keyboard, which he does warn you about, and believe me, I tried really hard to get that to work because I really like the keyboard. Unfortunately, it truly is (and in fairness, as described) a fundamental hardware limitation that can't be programmed around, so that means we can't use our nice UltraNav. days. The first time I tried it, I tested it out after 24 hours as suggested and while the excess silane glue exposed directly to air had cured, the silane between the metal had only partially done so and the whole thing peeled right off. The second time I let it sit for a week. That seemed stable. Raptor Blackbird, using a VGA-to-HDMI dongle on the Blackbird side. Folded up more flat this time, ready for the next project. A latch and a handle would also help to make this more portable, though I suspect some drilling may be required for that. I'll look at some options. For now, this suffices.

It's time for another save point in the continuing saga of the various ROMs for the Apple Network Server, Apple's first through-and-through Unix server (previously, previously). The Apple Network Server was only ever officially able to boot AIX, IBM's proprietary Power ISA-specific Unix, though it was originally intended to run Novell NetWare and was demonstrated booting Mac OS with early pre-production ROMs. However, much to industry surprise, late in its life cycle then-CTO Ellen Hancock announced that the ANS would be able to boot Mac OS and even Windows NT as well using ROM upgrades. Neither ROM was officially released before Steve Jobs convinced Gil Amelio to cancel the line, and for many years they were believed to be vapourware. But they've started to surface, first with an ex-Apple employee who had both the preproduction ROM and the Mac OS ROM on a flash ROM SIMM, and later another employee turned up with the NT ROM, though sadly more is needed to make it actually run NT. It turned out that I also had the preproduction ROM in a box gathering dust, and a couple months ago we put both the preproduction ROMs and NT ROMs through their paces. holmstock, our hard-working Apple Network Server 700 test rig (stockholm, my original ANS 500, is still officially a production unit). And there are some interesting things to report, especially when we pit the preproduction ROMs and this set head-to-head in MacBench, and even try booting Rhapsody on it. When we last left the 700, it still had the preproduction 1.1.20.1 ROM installed, which can be used to boot either MacOS or AIX and makes it look to MacOS like a Power Macintosh 9500, the ANS's closest relative. However, the ANS has unique hardware: two Symbios Logic 53C825A SCSI-2 Fast and Wide controllers (20MB/s) for the internal SCSI bays and on-board Cirrus Logic 54M30 graphics used in no other Apple product. MacOS never supported these and the preproduction ROM does not contain support for them, so to boot Mac OS you have to use the external 5MB/s CURIO SCSI (the ANS doesn't have the typical Power Macintosh MESH controller) and a Mac-compatible PCI video card. I selected a IMS TwinTurbo, the same card shipped with the Power Macintosh 9500, and booted it off an external BlueSCSI, both of which work well for this purpose. Once you get everything set up, versions up to at least Mac OS 9.1 are compatible, though with various annoying glitches you have to work around because it's not really a 9500. very quickly to the patterned Toolbox background. We have nothing installed it can boot from, so it almost immediately displays a gimme-disk animation, just like a regular Mac. But unlike most other Old World Macs (and the preproduction ROMs), the icon is in colour, because this is Open Firmware 2.0. bye and boot words, there is an io word to redirect output for you. If you type ttya io at the console, it immediately switches to serial on rear port 2 at 38400bps by default. We want to see if it does anything interesting when we start it, so we'll setenv input-device ttya:57600, setenv output-device ttya:57600 and reset-all to default it to serial startup, but we still have to hold down Cmd-Opt-O-F or it snaps back into the Toolbox ROM. Let's dump the device tree. printenv VARIABLE CURRENT DEFAULT little-endian? false false real-mode? false false auto-boot? true true diag-switch? false false fcode-debug? false false oem-banner? false false oem-logo? false false use-nvramrc? false false real-base -1 -1 real-size 100000 100000 virt-base -1 -1 virt-size 100000 100000 load-base 4000 4000 pci-probe-list -1 -1 screen-#columns 64 64 screen-#rows 28 28 selftest-#megs 0 0 boot-device /AAPL,ROM /AAPL,ROM boot-file diag-device fd:\diags fd:\diags diag-file input-device ttya:57600 kbd output-device ttya:57600 screen oem-banner oem-logo nvramrc boot-command boot boot ok 0 > dev / ok 0 > ls Children of the node: FF82A4C8: / [AAPL,9500 MacRISC] Node Adr Node Name Compatible FF82B8B8: /cpus@0 FF82B9D0: /PowerPC,604@0 FF82BDE8: /l2-cache@0,0 FF82C528: /chosen@0 FF82C658: /memory@0 FF82C7A0: /openprom@0 FF82C860: /AAPL,ROM@FFC00000 FF82CA78: /options@0 FF82CF28: /aliases@0 FF82D168: /packages@0 FF82D1F0: /deblocker@0,0 FF82D9C8: /disk-label@0,0 FF82E4B8: /obp-tftp@0,0 FF830710: /mac-files@0,0 FF832508: /mac-parts@0,0 FF8336F0: /aix-boot@0,0 FF833B40: /fat-files@0,0 FF835158: /iso-9660-files@0,0 FF835AC0: /xcoff-loader@0,0 FF836388: /terminal-emulator@0,0 FF836420: /bandit@F2000000 FF837848: /gc@10 FF837C80: /53c94@10000 FF839490: /sd@0,0 [sd] FF83A1E0: /st@0,0 [st] FF83AE80: /mace@11000 FF83BD10: /escc@13000 FF83BE68: /ch-a@13020 FF83C4C0: /ch-b@13000 FF83CB18: /awacs@14000 FF83CC00: /swim3@15000 FF83E050: /via-cuda@16000 FF83EF00: /adb@0,0 FF83EFF0: /keyboard@0,0 FF83F910: /mouse@1,0 FF83F9C0: /pram@0,0 FF83FA70: /rtc@0,0 FF83FF10: /power-mgt@0,0 FF83FFD0: /lcd@1C000 FF840908: /nvram@1D000 FF8426D0: /pci106b,1@B FF8428A8: /54m30@F [pci1013,a0] FF8445F8: /apple53C8xx@11 [53c825] FF8471E0: /sd@0,0 FF8480D8: /apple53C8xx@12 [53c825] FF84ACC0: /sd@0,0 FF840AA0: /bandit@F4000000 FF84BD60: /pci106b,1@B FF841F30: /hammerhead@F8000000 ok 0 > devalias vci0 /chaos@F0000000 pci1 /bandit@F2000000 pci2 /bandit@F4000000 fd /bandit/gc/swim3 kbd /bandit/gc/via-cuda/adb/keyboard ttya /bandit/gc/escc/ch-a ttyb /bandit/gc/escc/ch-b enet /bandit/gc/mace scsi /bandit/gc/53c94 scsi-int /bandit/gc/mesh screen /bandit@F2000000/54m30@F scsi-int would point to the internal SCSI, and a path like /bandit/gc/mesh (GC in this case is Grand Central) would do so on a regular Power Mac, but the ANS doesn't have a MESH. That means trying to list the contents of a CD-ROM in the internal optical drive, ordinarily SCSI 0 on an ANS ... dir scsi-int/sd@0,0:,\ unable to open the DIR device ok 0 > dir /bandit/apple53C8xx@11/sd@0,0:,\ . 00000010 000023 000002048 000 000 .. 00000010 000023 000002048 000 000 DIAGS. 00000000 000024 000189345 000 000 NWSTART. 00000000 000117 003603460 000 000 OFWBOOT. 00000000 001877 000349998 000 000 TRANS.TBL 00000000 002048 000000655 000 000 ok 0 > boot /bandit/apple53C8xx@11/sd@0,0:aix loader: unrecognized client program format state not valid disk2:aix Device isn't there! can't OPEN: /bandit/53c825@11/sd@2,0:aixOpenFirmware1.1.20 To continue booting the MacOS type: BYE<return> To continue booting from the default boot device type: BOOT<return> ok 0 > devalias vci0 /chaos@F0000000 pci1 /bandit@F2000000 pci2 /bandit@F4000000 fd /bandit/gc/swim3 kbd /bandit/gc/via-cuda/adb/keyboard ttya /bandit/gc/escc/ch-a ttyb /bandit/gc/escc/ch-b enet /bandit/gc/mace scsi /bandit/gc/53c94 scsi-int /bandit/53c825@11 lcd /bandit/gc/lcd screen /bandit/54m30@F scsi-int2 /bandit/53c825@12 disk0 /bandit/53c825@11/sd@0,0 disk1 /bandit/53c825@11/sd@1,0 disk2 /bandit/53c825@11/sd@2,0 disk3 /bandit/53c825@11/sd@3,0 disk4 /bandit/53c825@12/sd@4,0 disk5 /bandit/53c825@12/sd@5,0 disk6 /bandit/53c825@12/sd@6,0 ok 0 > boot disk0:aix or boot /bandit/53c825@11/sd@0,0:aix will boot AIX from the internal CD-ROM. improves performance. It's not clear what this ROM does in that instance, and in any case there are bigger problems such as the absolutely preposterous processor speed (this is a 150MHz PowerPC 604e). The L2 cache, at least, is correctly detected as the standard 700 1MB. We'll come back to this too. knew it hadn't been that bad. It also reported a bogus amount of L2 cache (2MB) despite the figure in the NSDU. But both Gauge PRO and TattleTech said there was no cache. eighty-nine percent of the reference G3 — 48% faster! My suspicion is this can be chalked up largely to the complete fail on the L2 cache and possibly also to the RAM speed, but either way, it was shocking how badly the 2.0 ROMs performed. boot scsi/sd@2,0:0 scsi/sd@2,0:8,mach_kernel (using a "partition zero" loader to chain into the actual Rhapsody kernel). On the preproduction ROMs, we got a CLAIM failed from Open Firmware no matter what settings I tried. waitForInterrupt bombed out, possibly because of the different interrupt setup on the ANS compared to the 9500. is correctly detected. these 2.0 ROMs, or more elemental issues like the L2 cache support would have gotten fixed. It certainly does smooth out certain rough spots, it supports all the ANS hardware as advertised, and it was more reliable with reboots, but the speed penalty you'll take running it just doesn't seem worth it. I could only see myself running this version if I had to have the biggest, baddest, meanest AppleShare server with tons of SCSI drives in Mac OS. Is there a later version out there yet to be found that does deal with those problems? Meanwhile, I'm going to work on a patched version of Mac OS for this machine to fix the reboot problems in 1.1.20, which I believe should be solveable with some resource hacking. That said, I'm not done with these ROMs just yet: I think Rhapsody, at least, can be made to work but it clearly needs a kernel patch, and I suspect the former Apple employee who got it working on the 2.0 ROMs did just that. Performance might still be hideously bad, but it's nevertheless another solid Un*xy option for Apple's best beige Unix box, and it even has historical value. To be continued if I can get my hands on some Rhapsody source code. Anybody feel leaky?