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Date:      Fri, 21 Nov 2014 11:14:53 +0200
From:      Jukka Ukkonen <jau789@gmail.com>
To:        Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@FreeBSD.org>,  Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org>
Cc:        freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Booting freebsd on a powermac g4 from a CD
Message-ID:  <546F028D.9040907@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20141121055732.GB56272@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <546E38E4.70305@gmail.com> <546E3959.5020904@freebsd.org> <20141121055732.GB56272@FreeBSD.org>

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On 11/21/14 07:57, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 10:56:25AM -0800, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> On 11/20/14 10:54, Jukka Ukkonen wrote:
>>> What might be the current official method or at least known
>>> working method for booting FreeBSD on a PowerMac G4 from a CD?
>>
>> You should just be able to insert the CD and hold 'C'. Does that not
>> work for you? What model of G4 is this?


Right, I needed the CD boot only to fix an existing FreeBSD-10.1
installation which had started hanging during boot time autoconfig
right after having displayed gem0 MAC address.
These odd systematic hangs began after updating from 10.1-RC3 to
10.1.

So, I installed an alternative 10.1 kernel from the CD.
It booted without any major problems both from the CD and from
the hard disk. The only apparent difference in my locally built
kernel was that it used VT instead of syscons.
The default ppc kernel on the CD seems to be using syscons.
Obviously I rebuilt the kernel locally once more switching back
from VT to syscons. Rebooting with the new locally built kernel
which uses syscons worked just fine again.
So, my quick hypothesis is that VT must be somehow broken.

An additional little brain teaser I found while fixing the
dysfunctional boot with the VT enabled kernel was that when
I boot the ppc system from a CD it seems to be quite happy
to work with a PS/2 keyboard connected to a USB adapter.
When I boot the system from hard disk this adapter and the
PS/2 keyboard connected to it are not recognized at all.
Here is what "usbconfig list" tells about the gizmo...

ugen1.2: <product 0x0018 vendor 0x13ba> at usbus1, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=LOW
(1.5Mbps) pwr=ON (400mA)

Anyhow it seems that for now it makes sense to stick to
using syscons instead of VT on ppc unless one wishes to
start debugging VT code.

Cheers,
--jau




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