auto booting

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On Wed, 19 Aug 2009, Axel Scheepers wrote:

> Hi List,
>
> First of all thanks for porting FreeBSD to powerpc, it runs great on my
> iBook over here and now I can even use my adb keyboard. Thanks!
>
> When installing I created an !Apple_HFS partition which I formatted and
> labeled Boot with hfsutils from ports yesterday so I can copy the loader
> there and don't have to boot from cd each time. This works great without
> auto boot; boot hd:loader hd:4 works like a charm.
>
> When I had OpenBSD on this laptop I remember I could just set
> boot-device to be able to autoboot but when I try this it seems the
> kernel is loading (I can hear it accessing drives/cdrom and the host
> starts pinging after a while) but there's no video output except for the
> basic moire x like background from openfirmware. The laptop also doesn't
> boot all the way when I use this, even after waiting quite some time
> there was no sshd listening so I rebooted it and booted it manually
> which works fine.
>
> NetBSD also has this issue if I'm correct, can someone explain to me why
> this is happening?

Open Firmware needs its output set to screen in order to initialize the 
display. You can do this with a custom bootscript, or you can use the HFS 
loader image that the system provides at /boot/boot1.hfs. This is a 
small HFS filesystem containing a boot block and an OF script that you can
dd to a !Apple_HFS or !Apple_Bootstrap partition. sysinstall still needs
to be taught about this...
-Nathan