Booting freebsd on a powermac g4 from a CD

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 11/21/14 12:08, Jukka Ukkonen wrote:
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> On 21 Nov 2014, at 18:47, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On 11/21/14 01:14, Jukka Ukkonen wrote:
>>>> On 11/21/14 07:57, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 10:56:25AM -0800, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>>>>>> On 11/20/14 10:54, Jukka Ukkonen wrote:
>>>>>> What might be the current official method or at least known
>>>>>> working method for booting FreeBSD on a PowerMac G4 from a CD?
>>>>> You should just be able to insert the CD and hold 'C'. Does that not
>>>>> work for you? What model of G4 is this?
>>> Right, I needed the CD boot only to fix an existing FreeBSD-10.1
>>> installation which had started hanging during boot time autoconfig
>>> right after having displayed gem0 MAC address.
>>> These odd systematic hangs began after updating from 10.1-RC3 to
>>> 10.1.
>>>
>>> So, I installed an alternative 10.1 kernel from the CD.
>>> It booted without any major problems both from the CD and from
>>> the hard disk. The only apparent difference in my locally built
>>> kernel was that it used VT instead of syscons.
>>> The default ppc kernel on the CD seems to be using syscons.
>>> Obviously I rebuilt the kernel locally once more switching back
>>> from VT to syscons. Rebooting with the new locally built kernel
>>> which uses syscons worked just fine again.
>>> So, my quick hypothesis is that VT must be somehow broken.
>>>
>>> An additional little brain teaser I found while fixing the
>>> dysfunctional boot with the VT enabled kernel was that when
>>> I boot the ppc system from a CD it seems to be quite happy
>>> to work with a PS/2 keyboard connected to a USB adapter.
>>> When I boot the system from hard disk this adapter and the
>>> PS/2 keyboard connected to it are not recognized at all.
>>> Here is what "usbconfig list" tells about the gizmo...
>>>
>>> ugen1.2: <product 0x0018 vendor 0x13ba> at usbus1, cfg=0 md=HOST spd=LOW
>>> (1.5Mbps) pwr=ON (400mA)
>>>
>>> Anyhow it seems that for now it makes sense to stick to
>>> using syscons instead of VT on ppc unless one wishes to
>>> start debugging VT code.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> --jau
>>>
>> This is very confusing to me. Are the kernel configs really *completely* identical aside from VT vs. syscons? VT uses the same code on PPC to use the framebuffer as syscons and doesn't touch any of this other stuff. 10.1 also doesn't have vt in GENERIC -- only 11 has that. Are you sure you didn't install an 11 image instead?
>> -Nathan
> Yes, the only diff was commenting sc out and putting vt in.
> I even named the modified version VTGENERIC to remember
> that this configuration shall never carry any other changes.
>
> --jau

OK, that's instructive anyway. How about the 10.1 CD thing? The 10.1 
ISOs have only syscons.
-Nathan