7.3 and 2010 Mac Pro

Issues related to hardware problems
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JacquesT
Posts: 4
Joined: 2017/06/01 15:39:25

7.3 and 2010 Mac Pro

Post by JacquesT » 2017/06/01 16:04:46

Afternoon,

For my sins I use a dual Xeon Mac Pro (2010) machine for Maya, Krita and general photo / image editing. While I love the sturdy hardware the slightly odd and bespoke EFI implementation has caused a few headaches. I've become a bit disillusioned with Apple's software and hardware update regime and have decided to give Centos a go after running Arch a few years ago, the hardware is completely usable for the next 2-3 years as far as I'm concerned. My arch system ran OK apart from Maya not liking a non RPM based distro, hence Centos. I'm pretty much done with macOS as the lack of gfx driver support for anything professional is just not there.

I've successfully installed Centos 7.3 and managed to get my nvidia card to work (either a K2000 or GTX 680, though I use the gtx card as it has a Mac bios and efi extensions) as well as build a driver for the broadcom wireless card. I'm having three issues I cannot sort out though, these being -

1) if I connect two monitors via DVI on the GTX 680 the login manager fails to display anything (DE is Gnome), I get two black screens with the gfx card fan spinning up, then down slowly and finally the monitors go to sleep. I can login normally via a run level 3 boot so I know the gfx drivers works (to a point). Unplugging one display works fine though, I've tried a few X configs, to no avail.This happens on a Fedora install as well so I suspect a gfx driver issue? (I was using the kmod nvidia driver on Centos)

2) when I put the machine to sleep all 7 fans in the machine ramp up to 100% and the machine becomes unresponsive (sounds like it's about to take off). I have to hard power down. Is there a log entry I can check to see what is going on? Should I be looking at specific sensor / sleep/ suspend support? I have 24Gb swap space.

3) My Wacom wireless receiver is recognised but I get no tablet feedback, it appears completely dead. Plugging in via USB registers OK. Any ideas how I can get this going?

Thank you in advance,

Jacques

Somerset, UK.

(edit : double signature removed)
Jacques
Somerset, UK

Custom Build - Xeon 1220v3 16GB AMD RX 580
HP ProBook 6470b (Debian 10)
Mac Pro 2010 (MacOS)

JacquesT
Posts: 4
Joined: 2017/06/01 15:39:25

Re: 7.3 and 2010 Mac Pro

Post by JacquesT » 2017/06/13 07:47:45

Just to close this off, all three issues go away when I install minimal Debian 8.8 -> Stretch upgrade + XFCE. I've found an install procedure for Maya which I'll use with the rpm packages.
Jacques
Somerset, UK

Custom Build - Xeon 1220v3 16GB AMD RX 580
HP ProBook 6470b (Debian 10)
Mac Pro 2010 (MacOS)

JacquesT
Posts: 4
Joined: 2017/06/01 15:39:25

Re: 7.3 and 2010 Mac Pro

Post by JacquesT » 2017/06/27 19:35:38

Update 2 - I thought I'd post this for in case anybody is ever stuck with non-working Dual DVI output from a single nvidia gfx card on a Mac Pro.

I tested the dual head DVI setup on a HP z620 machine and I get the same black screen -> display sleep result just before gdm3 login. I suspect this is a driver issue / gdm3 issue and is not Mac EFI related. This does not happen with XFCE, I've not tested KDE or other DE/DM's. For what it's worth, plugging in a DVI + Displayport cable makes the issue go away, so something somewhere is having a fit about two DVI outputs.

The sleep issue goes away with kernel 4.9> and so does the wacom tablet issue. I'm not sure is everything gets backported but those items may not have?

(Maya is a pain to setup in Debian!)
Jacques
Somerset, UK

Custom Build - Xeon 1220v3 16GB AMD RX 580
HP ProBook 6470b (Debian 10)
Mac Pro 2010 (MacOS)

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