MiniMac and Xorg

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 12:04 AM +0100 3/25/05, Tilman Linneweh wrote:
>Hello Peter & Co.
>
>First thanks for your work on the powerpc-port. Today I installed
>FreeBSD with the miniinst.iso on my 1,4 Ghz MiniMac.
>
>I installed the xorg-packages i found on your homepage, but they
>crash my machine. I found a file called kernel.xorg on your page,
>but unfortunately this one just panics with:
>pmap_bootstrap: can't get ofw translation count

This is probably the problem in that you can't pick an alternate
kernel from the boot-loader.  (Obviously you should be able to, but
if you 'unload' the default kernel and load any other kernel,
including /boot/kernel/kernel itself, you will run into the panic
that you're seeing).

This means that the only way to "test" a kernel is to install it
as the real kernel, and hope it works.  Note that if it does not
work, you will have no way to load the previously-working kernel...\
(unless you set up a multi-boot situation)

So, this is a rather risky thing to do.  I'm pretty sure that all
the changes that Peter had in that 'kernel.xorg' have now been
committed to the base system.

>Does xorg already work on powerpc?

I know Peter was working on this.  There was still some problem
with it the last time I tried it, but I forget what the details
were.  I know it wasn't working for me, and Peter was going to
check for the same problem on some powerbook or ibook that he
had access to.

>(BTW the usb Keyboard does not work inside DDB...)

It won't work for the panic which happens when loading an alternate
kernel, because the panic happens too soon.  I don't know if it
will work for panics which happen later in the startup process.

>I tried to compile my own world/kernel, but gcc crashes during
>compile.  From reading the mailinglist archive I was under the
>impression that I don't need to cross compile anything.

You do not need to cross-compile anything.  However, there are a
few updates to parts of gcc which you do still need to add yourself,
because they have not been added to the base system.

Looks like they are updates to:

http://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/rs6000.c.diff
http://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/sysv4.h.diff

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu