Installed system on an SMU ppc64 G5 loads a dangerous module

[Zarniwhoop]

 The later single processor powermac G5, and the related imacs, maybe even the most-recent multiprocessor G5s, have something withihn the hardware which the powermac alsa driver mis-identifies (Ben H knows about this, but it isn't a high priority).

 the 6.06-beta2 installer loads the alsa powermac module, which stops the desktop appearing (gets as far as a brown background, then nothing more). A thread in the forum talks of using a tty to rename /usr/bin/esd (I rebooted after that, perhaps killall esd would have been sufficient).

 Unfortunately, with this module loaded, the system displays the old ("lock up as soon as he's silly enough to try to get tab completion") behaviour in a tty, although without esd I was able to use a gnome terminal normally. Also, until I'd done this (previous attempts to use a tty to try to diagnose the problem) the system was very unstable - lock-ups within a couple of minutes, and attempts to shut it down produced an error message (scrolled too quickly to read) and did not power off.

 With esd renamed, I got a desktop and was able to rename the troublesome module so that it won't get loaded again.

 Shutdown was also very messy (had to ctrl-alt-bs to kill X, after that the box shut down cleanly), maybe that was a side-effect of having the alsa module loaded.

 On the bright side, this is a little better than 5.10 (the network now works with the shipped kernel), but still very close to unusable for your target audience.

[Niels Kristian Bech Jensen (nkbjensen)]

Does it help to blacklist the module by adding it to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file?

Also make sure it is not included in the /etc/modules file.

[Niels Kristian Bech Jensen (nkbjensen)]

I think this is a duplicate of bug #23445. Try this workaround:

* boot using "Linux single" so gdm is not started
* do not use tab on the console
* disable sound in gdm by setting

SoundProgram=/bin/true
SoundOnLogin=false

In /etc/gdm/gdm.conf

[Zarniwhoop (zarniwhoop)]

 Yes, it is a dup of #23445, dunno why that didn't show up when I searched (/me loathes the idiosyncracies of each bugtracking system).

 I agree the workaround should work for a little while, but my experience in a console with the powermac sound loaded was that it would lock up fairly soon, as if snd-powermac twiddles bits it has no right to touch.

 Also, trying to use a console without the tab key is damned hard!

 At the moment, the box is running 2.6.17-rc5 with snd-aoa and sound works - snd-aoa should be in alsa soon (possibly, 2.6.18) and when that happens the problem will disappear because the powermac driver is being fixed to not load when a layout ID is present. See
http://ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/attachments/20060607/f9eb6a89/attachment.diff

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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