BTX on USB pen drive

[John Nielsen]

On Friday 07 March 2008 09:13:12 am John Baldwin wrote:
> On Thursday 06 March 2008 07:29:40 pm Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> > On Fri, 7 Mar 2008, Vincent Mialon wrote:
> > > I tested various options in boot0cfg with no sucess. I also tested
> > > the howto from
> > > http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on
> > >-u sb-stick-episode-2 with a 6.3 FreeBSD release which boots on my
> > > pc but doesn't boot on my supermicro server.
> > >
> > > Do you have any idea or pointer that may help me find the way to
> > > boot this usb drive ? I may file a bug report if you want.
> >
> > I wanted to make a USB flash drive based installer for FreeBSD but
> > unfortunately BTX seems to have issues that make it difficult to do
> > reliably :(
> >
> > Here are 2 patches I tried..
> > http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/realbtx
> > http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/btx_crx.patch
>
> Try this instead:
>
> http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/btx_real.patch
>
> (btx_crx has been in the base system for a while FWIW).  This is
> somewhat similar to kib's patch but fixes at least one bug I found in
> kib's patch (and uses some slightly different approaches in a few
> places).

I have a laptop that does the BTX register-spin thing when booting from 
USB even if I use Grub, so I'll give your patch a try. The first hunk 
doesn't apply cleanly on today's 7-STABLE sources--the new page tables 
entry at line 29 throws it off. I applied that hunk manually and am 
rebuilding now.

FWIW the laptop is an Intel-based Gateway M465-E, and it boots from 
(internal) CD just fine. I don't currently have space or a partition on 
the internal hard drive for a FreeBSD install, hence the USB stick.

JN