Hardware/Driver Report - Bertha with OS X
Hardware Compatibility for Upgraded PM 8500 G4 800 X and OS X 10.2/10.3 and Prelim 10.4
 

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Hardware Compatibility Summary

Most test were run while using 10.2.x although most hardware also used/tested in 10.3 over time.

Every piece of 3rd party hardware hardware I tested that is billed as working on with an OS X supported system (and works on supported systems) also works as expected on this legacy system with three notable exceptions: The Realtek 8139 Ethernet controller, the Apple iSite video camera, and many high bandwidth USB 2.0 devices, such as hard drives.  The first two items function sporadically providing intermittent function with random failure that does not affect the the wider system.  Certain high bandwidth USB 2.0 devices can overload the system "freezing" it until those devices are disconnected, although they function normally (although of course more slowly) when limited to USB 1.1 speeds (such as by connecting them via a USB 1.1 hub).

Also many devices without official Mac support (or any support at all) and some older devices without obvious OS X support works with problems. This is (not surprisingly) commong with USB storage devices, keyboards, and mice plus FireWire drives.

Motherboard hardware works as expected with the exception of absent floppy support and sketchy audio support while using the built-in audio circuitry. The lack of floppy support is no different from officially supported systems (such as the "Beige" Power Macinoths G3 and 10.2) where the Apple floppy drives are also not supported as OS X simply includes NO support for these drives.  The audio issue is characterized by no control over the systems master audio volume (being fixed at medium), although applications can still control their volume output normally through there individual software althoug of course still limited by the master volume as set to medium. Some hardware such as serial LocaTalk support was never fully tested (its functionality has simply been replaced by newer ports, such as USB) and other hardware is so odd and model specific I have no way convenient way to test it (such as the A-V input board).

It appears likely that most unique problems including those with the iSite, USB 2.0, audio stuttering, and Realtek's ethernet controller are related to the older PCI 2.0 compliant slots of the first generation Power Macintoshes. Those buses appear to have trouble managing bandwidth and can be easily overloaded leading to choppy data streams (audio stuttering), bus overload with near system freezing (USB 2 drives), or complete device failure (Realtek networking).

Update 6/2005    OS X TIger 10.4 appears to not break any hardware or peripherals thus far, although detailed testing has not been done and hardware has not been specifically rotated out for testing and USB 2 devices that were problematic (such as drives) have not been tested yet. Some of the more important hardware in currently in place and functioning includes (but is not limited to): Radeon 7000 PCI video card, Sonnet Trio 133 PCI card combo card, Motorolla 802l.11g PCI card, existing ATA hard drives and optical drives, internal SCSI (boot) drive, Bluetooh keyboard and mouse via Apple OEM module, FireWire via target disk mode to Apple laptop, ADB keyboard and mouse, USB keyboard and mouse

Introduction and Considerations

One of the considerations with all heavily upgraded systems, especially those involving unsupported OS installs, is how dependent the system will be on 3rd party hardware drivers, that is, hardware  support not included (bundled) with the OS.  For any system native hardware support is a benefit in that 1) it tends to have less conflicts with the OS and other drivers and 2) it is less likely to break with an OS upgrade making the transition from upgrade to upgrade more seamless and reliable. 


This hardware stability through system upgrades is becoming more critical as the OS’s are expanding their use of Internet linked automatic-update capabilities.  A common example might be a particular systems use of a 3rd party Ethernet card that requires a 3rd pary driver to be installed.  At some point a system update, possible performed in the background unaware to the system owner, might cause that Ethernet card to stop working.  In such cases it can often be quite unclear how to fix the problem or, if needed, revert to an earlier OS version.  Such a failure might require either waiting for the card manufacturer to update the drivers, or a tedious OS reinstall simply to revert to the working version just before the update.

Considering these issues it is probably valid to consider driver compatibility and native support for peripherals and upgrades as area of comparison when evaulating heavily upgraded systems. This applies equally to PC and Macintosh systems and hardware compatibility (as referenced against a newer similar system) is also an reasonable metric to compare Mac and PC upgrades (although difficulties are numerous).

 
However, since it would only be confusing, I am not going to specifically mention XPF extensions in the details list but just consider them like part of the bundled system. I just note that installing OS X 10.0 to 10.4 on legacy machines requires the use of device drivers extensions (kext’s) that allow the OS to interact with the legacy motherboard and its chipsets including SCSI controllers, video, ect… kexts which are provided only by XPF.  These device drivers appear to be very stable and have persisted without problem through any system update (such as 10.2.4. to 10.2.5) only requiring modification for major system upgrades (10.2 to 10.3) if then.  As a result it is hard to get caught with your pants down from not installing some XPF driver udpate since major OS X upgrades normally requires one to boot from the install CD (unless you do it the hard way) and that requires a compatible version of XPostFacto be used by the user so that in fact XPF is pretty much just part of the system for legacy Macs.
 

Conventions for the Detailed Results:

 

No Drivers means the device operates with Apple bundled Apple supplied or vendor supplied drivers and did not require installation of separate or additional drivers (whether available or not).  Some hardware required drivers for complete function.  Note that No hardware (except the motherboards use of XPF's drivers) had driver requirements differing from a supported system.

 

Detailed Results

  

 

G4 CPU Daughtercard


Sonnet Creshendo PCI 1Ghz G4 with 256k/800Mhz L2 cache and 1M/240Mhz L3.  G4 uses a 16x multiplier setting the motherboard to 50Mhz.

"Nitro" 8500 Motherboard


ADB (Legacy Input Device Port – mouse, keyboard, ect…)
Serial (RS232 serial ports – modem, printers, localtalk, ect..)
SCSI ( SCSI 1 and Fast SCSI 2)
Video (On board PCI Video with 2 (of possible 4) 1 M DIMMS)
Sound In/Out
A-V Analog to Digital Converter Board
  
Floppy
  
Ethernet (10Mbps)

PCI Expansion Cards


Current installed or often used PCI cards are shown.  Oher cards discussed below.

Asante Etherfast 696 10/100 NIC (only one network card installed at any one time)
Motorolla 802.11G Wireless G
Power Color Radeon 7000 Video Card Multi-Display Edition (powered ATI)

Sonnet Trio 133 (ATA 133, FireWire 400, USB 2.0)

Other Cards


D-Link FireWire 400/USB 2.0 Card (same as Orange Micro card sold at the same time)
D-Link 530 txu+ 10/100 Card (uses Realtek 8139 chipset)
Some Cards Used in Other Systems

ALI FireWire 400/USB 2 Combo Card (based on ALI M5271 chipset with NEC and ALI controller chips)
SIIG Firewire400/USB 2/10/100 Enet (chipset 1394-TI, USB-NEC, 10/100 Ethernet-Realtek8139)

Internal Devices


 These consist of various drives.  All ATA and SCSI drives tested work.

SCSI (all devices on fast SCSI bus)

These devices worked as expected and did not require drivers.
 
* Other SCSI devices below in External Devices section
 
ATA (Using Sonnet Trio 133 with ATA 133 bus – “IDE”)

All hard drives listed below functioned, did not require drivers, and and could be used as boot drive.
 

All Optical drives could be used for booting.

Functions without additional drivers for CD/DVD reading but required some work for burning.  From the simplest perspective the drive requires 3rd party drivers for CD burning (no native support) although this is a new drive and support is certainly pending in a future OS update.  However, Disk Utility is able to erase disks and this and most unsupported drives, and full burning support is available from the command line.  Roxio Toast v 5 or 6 worked well for operating this and any other OEM or 3rd party drive I have tried.
OS X is perfectly capable of writing to this drive (and almost any other CD or DVD burner), it just chooses not too.  OS X maintains a set of device profiles (usually organized by vendor) which describes the basics rules of each drive, such as what commands they know, write modes they support, quirk, ect… and drives without a listing are considered to have “No Support”.  I was able to add functionality for this drive by simply* creating a file describing the basic characteristics of the drive (such as its vendor ID, type – CDRW/DVD, and speed 48x24x48x16), naming the file as the vendor ID name, iomegacddvd482416e23-c.drprofile, and adding to to the root library folder in /Library/DiscBurning/DeviceProfiles/.  It would appear this is the way Apple intends to allow end users to add support for drives without native OS support (but would probably function) without having us hack the System folder device drivers.  My custom device profile is here (I didn’t figure this out myself, rather lots of smarter people did, I just took what I was reading and kept trying it until it worked).  PatchBurn II is also being developed (in beta when I wrote this and did not fully support my drive) which promises to automate the process of created these device description files.  This is available at www.xlr8yourmac.com.
* Simply in this case involved 6 weeks of experimenting with the device description and file name and quite a bit of failed experimenting with various hacked or beta version of Apple’s DiscBurning framework.  I am still not sure what change I made that finally worked?

There is some lag before Apple adds new devices to its supported list.  I am now so much in the habit using PatchBurn to automate this I never even check for existing support anymore.

External Devices


SCSI
FireWire
External HD’s and Optical drives including FW target disk mode

Apple iSight Digital Video Camera (straight raw digital feed for Video Chat)


ADS Pyro AV Link Analog to Digital Converter (imports from any analog video source)


USB

All devices tested work as expected as USB 1.1 devices with no failures.  USB 2 function is mixed with some devices working and others having problems (usually freezes solved immediately by disconnected the devcie).  Problems seem bandwidth related with USB 2.0 external drives having problems every time and the Palm Tungsten T2 never.

Tested devices include (more have been used):

Bluetooth devices work as expected with including these tested devices.

Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, MS Bluetooth mouse, Zoom Bluetooth modem, Sony Ericcson T637 Bluetooth phone, Palm Tungsten T2, PowerBook G4 12 and iBook G4

ADB

All ADB devices, including a Macally 2 button ADB mouse with 3rd party (some dudees) driver work.  

Serial

Two old Global Village modems, a 33.6 and a 56k - Who knew the damned things worked?
No Drivers for modems with this setup caveat - Connecting to remote dial-up servers and fax receiving/sending work (actually faxing is via a GUI interface to the native Unix faxing built into the Unix substructure of X.)  Native faxing is new as of Panther and lacks the interface controls to select an old serial (not USB or Bluetooth) modem. Clearly the Fax setup utility does not even look for valid RS232 serial ports although the faxing system and the OS X driver layer can use them just fine.  Page Sender, the 3rd party fax software I was already using (since OS X did not have fax software bundled before Panther), works perfectly for fax send and recieve. It also allows fax sharing (for sending) as print sharing via the standard OS X print sharing system.

 




Counter Display Suspended by Page


Document made with Nvu

 

 

Created 4/19/2004 - determined by file creation date (determied 5/13/2005)

Modified 5/13/05 - reformatted in Nvu  for proper lists, Nav Bar added, and plus FW, USB,  BT and other lists added along with ALI, SIIG, and 802.11G cards.

Modfied 6/17/04 - mild reformatting, interim 10.4 update