PowerPC/IBM POWER: Out of memory errors when cloning even small partitions, suggests EB of RAM are needed

[hamishmb]

Hi there,

I recently tried partclone on an old iBook G4 (32-bit PowerPC), as I find it a great tool when combined with Clonezilla, except Clonezilla doesn't work on PowerPC for reasons I can't remember.

When trying to run partclone, even on small partitions of a few hundred MB, I receive out of memory errors from partclone that suggest EB of RAM are needed. I'm not sure what might cause this, but I'm happy to try and help debug if you can give me some pointers.

I don't have the exact message, but I can run it again if that would be useful?

OS: Void Linux PPC (rolling-release), Linux 5.15.

[Thomas-Tsai]

Oops, I am so sorry to reply late. I just checked your message and tried to find any PPC arch environment for testing. Do you know any PPC I can reproduce myself? Cloud provider or KVM ?

The other question is, what file system do you want to clone? hfs or hfsp?

[hamishmb]

No problem :)

You can emulate a mac99 machine in QEMU/KVM: https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/system/ppc/powermac.html

I haven't yet tried running VOID PPC in that (yet), but it can run Mac OS X, so I don't imagine it will have any problems.

I think I was trying HFS first, then I tried HFS+ and FAT, but I think they all had the same problem.

[robert-scheck]

I might be wrong, but I think an Apple iBook G4 and QEMU mac99 are both big-endian (and there are known test failures for FAT on another big-endian architecture, see commit 886bea8).

[hamishmb]

Most likely I'll give it a go in QEMU soon.