FreeBSD 10.1 PPC64 on XServe G5 hangs at Openfirmware Loader [-r277483's .iso's can boot quad-core PowerMac!]

[Mark Millard]

I burned FreeBSD-10.1-STABLE-powerpc-powerpc64-20150121-r277483-disc1.iso to a CD and booted a PowerMac G5 Quad-Core from the CD, selecting Live-CD. It worked.

Like other forms of booting FreeBSD from a 10.x boot media, it may hang very early in the process (showing a blank/dark screen after clearing the openfirmware black-on-white screen) and have to be retried. (In fact I had that issue during my experiment.)

I think the is the first 10.x prebuilt .iso download vintage with Nathan Whitehorn's fix/work-around included and so is the first 10.x CD burn to be so bootable in a long time. (Before it would consistently hang while in the loading activity, during the openfirmware display time frame.) For those wanting/needing to use CD media built from the .iso's: Thanks Nathan.

(I do not know about the sparc64 status: I do not have access to such a context. Something had been written before about the sparc64's 64-bit, big endian context also having a similar issue booting from CD burns of the sparc64 .iso's.)



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Mark Millard
markmi at dsl-only.net