(Too much) Fun with Big Endian
November 9, 2016
Using a Big Endian PowerPC as my main desktop is proven to be nothing less than problematic - it’s good - a good practice in filing bug reports, which I did not seem to be good at.
So, here below is a list of bug reports I have opened so far, as an record for later reference:
- Freedesktop.org Bugzilla #98629: OpenGL applications warns “MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information”
- Freedesktop.org Bugzilla #98630: Bad color and glitches on PPC64
- Freedesktop.org Bugzilla #98631: GPU lock ups when starting GDM, SDDM, and Plasma Desktop
- KDE Bugzilla #372202: Wrong coloring when running on Big Endian architecture
- GNOME Bugzilla #774085: Bad coloring on Big Endian architecutre
- QTBUG #56975: QtQuick/QML displayed with wrong colors on Big Endian architecture
That is indeed a whole suite of bug reports, but in the case of wrong colors were displayed (especially on those rendered by GLX), I have filed numerous bug reports across different projects - for the lack of knowledge on the origin of this issue.
Some main take-aways, however, are collected from my conversation with these developers:
- Currently, a possible way to work around nouveau-related GPU lock ups on Big Endian machines is to remove nouveau_dri.so - that said, you will be using LLVMpipe for your GLX applications - not efficient, but at least it doesn’t lock up any more (also, despite the wrong coloring).
- 64K paging is an absolute no-go for Big Endian PPC with nouveau.
- GNOME is (still) the slowest at responding to issues.
Still in hope, I am waiting for Plasma on my PowerMac G5.