sonnet L2/G3 in 6500 powermac

[yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

I was "out of town" for a few days. So: the continuing [read: never ending]
story of a Sonnet L2/G3 upgrade in a 6500...

I've now tried all versions of BootX in existence, including
yellowdog's custom 1.2.3 which was briefly available in YDL 2.
That does not help.

Ken:
> Something here doesn't sound right ;-}If you get into Linux "with the G3
> running (so the Sonnet extension already did its work)" then why do
> you still need to "get the G3 recognised"?
At the time I wrote this I didn't understand much, but now I think I do:
Sonnet's L2/G3 card contains both an L2 cache and a G3 processor.
Some people succeeded - with older YDL, and older versions of
the Sonnet card - to soft-boot into Linux with the G3 enabled,
ie, with the cpu of the computer being the G3 chip in the L2 slot
rather than the 603e ppc chip
[which is still physically present in its old place].
But they still did not have the L2 cache enabled. I do not get even
this far, so this trick is irrelevant.

> One other question for Richard: With the 6500 motherboard what are the
> memory limits? I saw a deal for 5V 128MB DIMMS for $16 each the other
> day. In the 5500 the machine will only read 64 MB per DIMM, but a 6500
> might be able to use the full 128 MB x 2 which would make a 6500 MB
> transplanted into a 5500 a very useful upgrade!

The maximum capacity of the 6500 is 1 x 128 MB.  Not really enough for
mac OS X but plenty for YDL 3.0.

In fact my 6500 is a 6500/275 motherboard in an LC 630 case! But it is
a great little linux computer! YDL works wonderfully, except only at
half-speed (ie 275 MHz). Under OS 9 with Sonnet it is 500 MHz.

The problem is, that the Sonnet L2/G3 is a hardware hack, the extension
which enables it is an OS 9 hack, BootX is an OS 9 hack - half startup
Mac OS then try to gracefully hand over control to Linux. Sonnet does
not want to tell the linux ppc people anything about how they do it.
And to be honest - there are not that many people around crazy enough
to be putting so much energy into such old/odd hardware.

BTW, does anyone know a) why my replies to a thread are archived as a
new thread, and b) why I'm "yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com"
and not plain Richard Gill, on the archive?

Richard