Apple Mac G4 Cube and T2/Linux

open G4 Cube

The Apple Power Mac G4 Cube was a quiet, fanless, compact Macintosh personal computer from Apple Inc. and was sold from 2000 to 2001.

This 9 3/4 x 7 3/4 x 7 3/4" (24.8 x 19.7 x 19.7 cm) cube of "polycarbonate plastic and other materials", houses a PowerPC G4 processor and won several design prizes and was included in the permanent collection of New York City's Museum of Modern Art ...

Notes

Unlike on other Apple systems of that time, suspend to RAM does not yet work under Linux out of the box, due to lacking re-initialization code for the ATi Rage chip (Linux r128 FB driver). When updated with a Radeon based card with proper re-initialization code in the Linux kernel suspend to RAM just works as usual.

Performance Index

8:30m to build bash-5.2-015 w/ gcc-9.3 (no-LTO, -Osmarter), linux-5.5.11 (1.2Ghz upgrade)

/proc/cpuinfo

processor : 0
cpu : 7400, altivec supported
temperature : 15-17 C (uncalibrated)
clock : 450.000000MHz
revision : 2.9 (pvr 000c 0209)
bogomips : 49.66
timebase : 24907666
platform : PowerMac
machine : PowerMac5,1
motherboard : PowerMac5,1 MacRISC Power Macintosh
detected as : 68 (PowerMac G4 Cube)
pmac flags : 00000014
L2 cache : 1024K unified
pmac-generation : NewWorld

A third-party 1.2 GHz CPU upgrade would look like:

processor : 0
cpu : 7447/7457, altivec supported
clock : 1200.000000MHz
revision : 1.1 (pvr 8002 0101)
bogomips : 49.81

timebase : 24907667
platform : PowerMac
model : PowerMac5,1
machine : PowerMac5,1
motherboard : PowerMac5,1 MacRISC2 MacRISC Power Macintosh
detected as : 68 (PowerMac G4 Cube)
pmac flags : 00000015
pmac-generation : NewWorld
Memory : 1536 MB

lspci

0000:00:0b.0 Host bridge: Apple Computer Inc. UniNorth AGP
0000:00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 PF/PRO AGP 4x TMDS
0001:10:0b.0 Host bridge: Apple Computer Inc. UniNorth PCI
0001:10:17.0 Class ff00: Apple Computer Inc. KeyLargo Mac I/O (rev 03)
0001:10:18.0 USB Controller: Apple Computer Inc. KeyLargo USB
0001:10:19.0 USB Controller: Apple Computer Inc. KeyLargo USB
0001:10:1a.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB12LV26 IEEE-1394 Controller (Link)
0002:20:0b.0 Host bridge: Apple Computer Inc. UniNorth Internal PCI
0002:20:0f.0 Class ffff: Illegal Vendor ID Unknown device ffff (rev ff)

lsusb

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05ac:1001 Hub in Apple USB Keyboard
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05ac:0202 Apple USB Keyboard