Booting FreeBSD/powerpc from external FireWire drive?

[Paul Mather]

I'm trying to install FreeBSD/powerpc{,64} on an external FireWire drive.  I've been successful in installing a 9-CURRENT snapshot.  The problem is that I don't know how to boot from this drive from OpenFirmware, given I also have Mac OS X installed on a separate hard drive---the internal hard drive that is the default boot drive.

Using a PowerBook G4, I was able to boot the external FW drive containing FreeBSD by holding down the Option key during startup and then choosing the FreeBSD drive from the list of bootable drives that is displayed.  Unfortunately, I want to use this external FW drive to boot into FreeBSD on an headless Xserve G5 via a serial console.  Lacking the graphical boot drive chooser, I need to use the OpenFirmware "boot" command or set the boot-device in NVRAM to designate the external FW drive as the boot drive.

Can anyone help me figure out the appropriate OpenFirmware command to boot FreeBSD from the external FW drive?  The "devalias" command reports I have "fw" and "fwx" aliases, which I presume refer to FireWire.  Alas, I can't fathom what the boot command arguments would be.  I followed the gpart partitioning scheme listed in the FreeBSD/powerpc install instructions at http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/ppcinstall.txt with an 800K apple-boot partition as the first one in the APM.

If it would make it easier, the external FW drive I have can also be used as a USB drive.  So, if it is easier to boot from an external USB, I could do that, if someone can tell me the appropriate boot arguments.

Cheers,

Paul.