8.1-RC1 fails to boot on iBook G4

[Paul Mather]

On Jun 17, 2010, at 9:38 AM, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:

> On 06/16/10 21:13, Paul Mather wrote:
>> I just tried to book the 8.1-RC1 disc1 ISO on an iBook G4 but it failed to boot into FreeBSD.  I was left at the Open Firmware prompt.  Is FreeBSD known not to work on an iBook G4?  I was able to boot successfully into the FreeBSD installer using this same disc on a PowerBook G4.
>>   
> 
> That should work perfectly fine. I have a G4 iBook of the same model running FreeBSD.
> 
>> Decrementer exception at   %SRR0: 00100100   %SRR1: 10003030
>>   
> 
> This is a very rare race during early initialization that happens on some machines and that no one has been able to track down. A timer seems to have gone off in the middle of the OF->kernel transition. It's possible that if you wait a different amount of time at the boot prompt it won't happen.

I tried waiting a different amount of time during a couple of boot attempts, but it made no difference.  Some of the times I waited until different points during the countdown to boot before pressing the return key, and at least once I pressed space to go to the boot prompt and let it sit there for a while before issuing "boot."  Every time, it failed to boot FreeBSD.

Almost always, I get the "Decrementer exception" error above, but once I got something akin to a "Memory access error" reported, with the same %SRR0 and %SRR1 values.  I even reset the iBook's PRAM via Command-Option-P-R, but to no avail.

Cheers,

Paul.