FreeBSD 8.1-release on PowerBook G4 - is firewire disks supported?

[Torfinn Ingolfsen]

Hello,

Are firewire drives supported in FreeBSD 8.1-release on powerpc?

I am trying to install FreeBSD 8.1-release on a PowerBook G4[1] I have.
The internal disk drive contains OS X, and will continue that way. So I
am trying to install FreeBSD on an external drive I have, a Maxtor
firewire drive.  This drive shows up both in OS X and in Open Firmware,
but after booting the FreeBSD install image (disc1), it is nowhere to
be seen.
- there are no nodes in /dev for it (I used echo /dev/* to verify)
- camcontrol devlist -v lists only the memory stick I am booting from
- camcontrol rescan all doesn't change anything

I can see lines with "firewire" when the machine boots, but there is no
dmesg command on the disc1 image, and the PowerBook doesn't have a
"scroll lock" key on its keyboard, so its quite hard to look closer at
the dmesg.

Booting from a usb memory stick.
As an added challenge, the internal dvd drive in the PowerBook isn't
working anymore, so I have to use other means to boot the FreeBSD
installer (disc1). First I tried with a usb cd drive (ok, it is a
Plextor DVW writer) I have, but for some reason the Powerbook will not
boot from it, neither with the boot choser (alt / opt) or from Open
firmware. Not so strange perhaps, as the Plextor drive doesn't show up
in Open Firmware at all (it works nicely on a lot of Intel machines,
but that is off topic here).
For my second try,  I simply used dd to copy the
FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-powerpc-disc1.iso image to a usb memory stick I
have, and that worked better. It will not boot from the boot choser
(alt / opt on boot), but it will boot from Open firmware, after I have
figured out where it lives in the device tree and made an alias for it.
The commands I used were:
devalias ud /pci at f2000000/usb at 1b,1-disk at 1
boot ud:,\boot\loader ud:0

More info at my FreeBSD pag for the Powerbook[2].

References:
1) http://sites.google.com/site/tingox/powerbook_g4
2) http://sites.google.com/site/tingox/powerbook_g4_freebsd
-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen