MorphOS Still Being Toyed With For PowerPC

MorphOS, the Amiga-compatible PowerPC operating system, is still being experimented with on PowerPC hardware. The latest effort out of the MorphOS camp is to make the operating system work on the IBM PowerPC G5.

As shared on MorphOS.pl, the port of MorphOS to the PowerPC G5 is working quite well. In less than one month time, a developer got MorphOS up and running on the G5 with the bare essentials. "So the status now is that the G5 boots to MorphOS and seems to run stable, however only USB and the on-board IDE interfaces are support by MorphOS drivers right now. The next things I will focus on is getting the on-board NIC and fan control working. Hopefully neither of those two will be particularly difficult, so that will likely be done some time this week."

The G5 is different enough from the other supported PowerPC hardware by MorphOS that some challenges were to overcome in getting the 12-year-old operating system up and running. "The G5 is incompatible to regular PowerPC CPUs in a number of, for MorphOS, important aspects, both when it comes to the supervisor mode and the user mode. Unfortunately some of the supervisor mode incompatibilities have been done in such a way that executing code written for PPC32 on the G5 will run without errors, but subtle differences in the operation of some instructions caused problems with system stability which were hard to track down."