Re: Netbooting an xserve G5?

Is this an SMP XServe, or a single CPU?  If SMP, you can try disabling
SMP with "kern.smp.disabled=1" at loader prompt, and see if that
improves things.  It sounds counter-intuitive, but if there's a bug in
the clock sync that could explain the problem.  I recall a PR opened
about something related.

- Justin

On Fri, 10 Jan 2025 19:13:16 +0000
Abu Hussain Al Mukhtar <abuhussain@secure.mailbox.org> wrote:

> Hi Alexey,
> 
> Thank you very much - I totally missed that guide.
> 
> It worked, and I am able to boot single user now.
> 
> The only problem: the host runs e x c r u c i a t i n g l y slow -
> not as in 'it lags!', but as in 'I have to wait for minutes until
> what I type on the keyboard appears on the screen', so the system
> really isn't usable in this state.
> 
> My NFS server is a DragonFly box. It has netbooted, as I stated
> before, NetBSD and OpenBSD seamlessly. I checked the FreeBSD docs,
> specifically the 'Advanced Networking' section which describes PXE,
> but there is no mention of specific/preferred flags to be passed to
> NFS/mountd.
> 
> Has anyone seen this behaviour before and/or could you share the
> relevant portion of your rc.conf so I can check it against mine?
> 
> Alexey: Thanks again for the useful hint!
> 
> BR.-
> 
> * Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@freebsd.org>:
> > On Fri, Jan 10, 2025 at 11:06:55AM +0000, Abu Hussain Al Mukhtar
> > wrote:  
> > > Hi all!
> > > 
> > > As the subject line implies, I am looking for a way to netboot an
> > > XServe G5 using the ppc64 port. This server I got for close to
> > > nothing is on an excellent state, though unfortunately, the CD
> > > drive is not really working (it ejects every CD/DVD I have ever
> > > tried to feed it), and there are conflicting accounts on whether
> > > or not these machines can boot from an USB stick.  
> > 
> > I've never bothered to boot my macs from removable media, and always
> > preferred netbooting, esp. given how easy it is to setup.  This is
> > the first option recommended by grehan@ in his guide* and that's
> > how I've installed FreeBSD on all my G4/G5 machines.  HTH,
> > 
> > ./danfe
> > 
> > *) https://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/install.html
> >   
>