8.1-RC1 fails to boot on iBook G4

[Paul Mather]

On Jun 20, 2010, at 3:01 PM, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:

> On 06/19/10 10:29, Paul Mather wrote:
>> 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.
>>   
> That's very strange -- 0x00100100 is the very first instruction in the kernel, so it hasn't even had a chance to run yet. Maybe there is a hardware problem with your CD drive? Can you check that the MD5 of the disc matches the one on the FTP site when read from your iBook?

The exact same disc will boot without issues on a PowerBook G4, so I suspect the disc itself is okay.

Today, I downloaded and burned the NetBSD/macppc 5.0.2 install ISO.  I was able to boot successfully into the NetBSD installer from Open Firmware using that disc.  So, I guess the CD hardware is probably okay, and whatever the NetBSD boot loader is doing, it is able successfully to boot on this iBook G4 whereas the FreeBSD one can't.

Cheers,

Paul.