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Date:      Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:23:32 -0500
From:      Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org>
To:        Ed Schouten <ed@80386.nl>
Cc:        FreeBSD PowerPC <freebsd-ppc@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD on my old rusty PowerBook 12"
Message-ID:  <4908B834.4030805@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <20081029190724.GH1165@hoeg.nl>
References:  <20081029190724.GH1165@hoeg.nl>

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Ed Schouten wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> A couple of days ago I saw a commit flash by, which added ADB support to
> FreeBSD. This means I can finally use FreeBSD on my old PowerBook 12",
> which is doing nothing right now.
>   
Welcome to PPC! The introduction of the MPsafe TTY layer was what fixed 
the last locking bugs in akbd that I hadn't managed to track down, so 
thanks :)
> I tried to install FreeBSD on the system and it somewhat works, but I
> think I need to do something differently to get it working properly.
>
> I downloaded the 200810 snapshot, which does not support ADB, so I'm
> using an USB keyboard right now. Good enough. When I get into the
> installer, it seems there is some kind of hard-coded disk layout. I only
> have ad0s2 and ad0s3, where ad0s2 is 128 MB and ad0s3 is the rest of the
> disk. I can't create any more partitions. So right now I've put / on
> ad0s2 and /usr on ad0s3, which is pretty awful.
>   
Sysinstall doesn't (currently) have the ability to modify APM layouts. 
gpart does. This should be fixed. The result is that sysinstall just 
uses whatever partitions happen to be on your disk already.
> About boot loaders: I just booted from the harddisk by running in the
> ofw console:
>
> 	boot cd:\boot\loader hd:2
>
> But I want to have a boot loader on the harddisk itself. I read
> something about putting a HFS partition on the disk and storing a file
> in it? Is that what ad0s2 is for?
>   
I have a hack in head to solve this. If you rebuild world, you will get 
a /boot/boot1.hfs. This is a little (800 K) HFS partition with a port of 
the sparc64 boot1 in it, which you can dd to an 800 K partition to get 
OFW to boot your machine. However, sysinstall doesn't know about this 
yet either. You can make this and your regular FreeBSD partitions with 
gpart, then use dd and boot1.hfs to get a bootable system with sane 
partitioning.
-Nathan



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