I have many PowerPC Macs around. I see that the past 2 releases have dropped support for PowerPC. Is there something that prevents the new releases of Blender from running on PowerPC, or is it not worth the effort to keep creating builds for it?

Thanks!

Anyone know?

I *think* the primary problem is none of the blender developers are using PPC anymore. As far a I know, it should be possible to build blender, although you may end up compiling all the dependencies yourself.

There may be some weird Apple ecosystem reasons, like drivers, why this may not work.

Have you checked on graphicall.org for PPC builds?

And are you offering to be the PPC platform maintainer?

stiv wrote:

I *think* the primary problem is none of the blender developers are using PPC anymore. As far a I know, it should be possible to build blender, although you may end up compiling all the dependencies yourself.

OK- so if I build with the instructions here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Doc/Building_Blender/Mac , it should build 2.65. I'll try that.

As for being PowerPC platform maintainer, it is possible, depending on how much it can be automated. Perhaps one of the current MacIntel maintainers could comment on how they build?

Thanks!

I built following the instructions I linked to above. It was not successful, pulling this error:

Code:

"/Users/user/blender-build/build/darwin/makesdna" /Users/user/blender-build/build/darwin/source/blender/makesdna/intern/dna.c dyld: Library not loaded: /System/Library/Frameworks/QTKit.framework/Versions/A/QTKit   Referenced from: /Users/user/blender-build/build/darwin/makesdna   Reason: no suitable image found.  Did find:    /System/Library/Frameworks/QTKit.framework/Versions/A/QTKit: no matching architecture in universal wrapper    /System/Library/Frameworks/QTKit.framework/Versions/A/QTKit: no matching architecture in universal wrapper source/blender/render/intern/source/convertblender.c:129: warning: unknown option after ‘#pragma GCC diagnostic’ kind scons: *** [/Users/user/blender-build/build/darwin/source/blender/makesdna/intern/dna.c] Error -5 scons: building terminated because of errors.

It appears that it is an issue with architecture. Any ideas?

It tried building for ppc instead of ppc64, though my computer is a G5 with 64 bit support. I think it went further, but still pulls errors.

Code:

source/blender/modifiers/intern/MOD_meshcache_pc2.c: In function ‘meshcache_read_pc2_head’: source/blender/modifiers/intern/MOD_meshcache_pc2.c:65: error: ‘PC2Head’ has no member named ‘huh’ scons: *** [/Users/user/blender-build/build/darwin/source/blender/modifiers/intern/MOD_meshcache_pc2.o] Error 1 source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_DerivedMesh.h:729: warning: ‘DM_origindex_mface_mpoly’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:42: warning: ‘_bmo_elem_flag_test’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:47: warning: ‘_bmo_elem_flag_test_bool’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:52: warning: ‘_bmo_elem_flag_enable’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:57: warning: ‘_bmo_elem_flag_disable’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:62: warning: ‘_bmo_elem_flag_set’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:68: warning: ‘_bmo_elem_flag_toggle’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_iterators_inline.h:161: warning: ‘BM_iter_new’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:74: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_int_insert’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:81: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_bool_insert’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:89: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_float_insert’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:102: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_ptr_insert’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:109: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_elem_insert’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:118: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_empty_insert’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:124: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_contains’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:155: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_float_get’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:166: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_int_get’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:177: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_bool_get’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:189: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_ptr_get’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_operator_api_inline.h:198: warning: ‘BMO_slot_map_elem_get’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_inline.h:43: warning: ‘_bm_elem_flag_test’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_inline.h:48: warning: ‘_bm_elem_flag_test_bool’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_inline.h:63: warning: ‘_bm_elem_flag_set’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_inline.h:69: warning: ‘_bm_elem_flag_toggle’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_inline.h:74: warning: ‘_bm_elem_flag_merge’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_inline.h:79: warning: ‘_bm_elem_flag_merge_into’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_inline.h:118: warning: ‘_bm_elem_index_set’ defined but not used source/blender/bmesh/intern/bmesh_inline.h:123: warning: ‘_bm_elem_index_get’ defined but not used scons: building terminated because of errors.

Looks like the big-endian support in that source file is incomplete. If I were to take a guess, the missing code is to do endian switching of all the fields in that PC2Head structure after the “header” array.

ldo wrote:

Looks like the big-endian support in that source file is incomplete. If I were to take a guess, the missing code is to do endian switching of all the fields in that PC2Head structure after the “header” array.

I figured out why ppc64 wouldn't work. If you choose ppc64, it will build with QTKit, which was causing the problem.

As for little/big endian, what can be done about this?

MisterKeeks wrote:

As for little/big endian, what can be done about this?

It seems like the "huh" should actually be "file_version" (the first field after the "header" field).

The code still seems unportable though, since it uses "int" for 32-bit integers, which won't fly on e.g. ILP64 archs... Better to use the specific size types defined by the C standard (int32_t et al).

i tried compiling round about end of last year, started a topic about ppc-blender here.
it doesn't work out of the box.

anyway - i tried a few afternoons and after that quit trying because i thought my build-environment was broken.

which xcode do you use?

farbw3rk wrote:

which xcode do you use?

I don't use xcode, I'm on Linux (Gentoo).

For me, Blender builds if I fix the "huh" thing, but on startup it just shows a blank window. I can close the window to make it quit normally though, so it doesn't seem completely hung...

[quote="zeldin"][quote="farbw3rk"]which xcode do you use?[/quote]
I don't use xcode, I'm on Linux (Gentoo).

[/quote]

sorry, i meant keeks with the xcode-question. anyway - interesting to hear linux won't build out of the box in 2.6x, too. never tried building 2.6x under linux.

Ah, sorry.

farbw3rk wrote:

anyway - interesting to hear linux won't build out of the box in 2.6x, too. never tried building 2.6x under linux.

Yes, this was media-gfx/blender-2.66 from the main Gentoo portage tree. Without patching MOD_meshcache_pc2.c it's FTBFS on PPC.

hmmm...i just plugged in my G5 again and try a fresh 10.5 install (was about time anyway...my poor old knight in shiny armor...).
can't get latest ppc xcode3.1.4, developer.apple.com mac dev-center is down. :(

while waiting for the 10.5 install to finish i tried crosscompile on my intel-mac to ppc with the latest blender-svn and an old xcode3.2 version.
if you like red give it a go! it is still running but i doubt the finished build will be usable. ^^

update: ok, it failed. but mostly my fault - something wrong with python here. so there may be hope! :)