Boot from Firewire (VIA Fire II)

[Kevin Roettger]

 Hello Dieter,

First off, thanks for taking the time to answer.

>I think your VIA card needs to have a "BIOS boot ROM" in order to boot from it.

Doesn't look so good there, it's a noname PCI card recovered from an old PC... anyhow the BIOS does not find it no matter what I choose to boot from.

>Alternately, if one of the FLOSS BIOSs supports your mainboard, it might
>be possible to add support there.

That's a good idea, I will definitly check it out.

>I have a mainboard with the VT6307 onboard, but I don't recall seeing any mention
>of it (or Firewire) in the BIOS.  On an unrelated note, are you able to get your
>VT6306 into "non-CYCLEMASTER mode"?

Indeed the BIOS does not mention Firewire at all, but I thought maybe SCSI could work since SCSI emulation is used for many things.
Being not familiar with the CYCLEMASTER mode, I googled around and just tried this:

saloon# fwcontrol -u 0 -f 0
send phy_config root_node=0 gap_count=-1
saloon# fwcontrol -u 0 -r
After those commands, end of dmesg gives me this:

fwohci0: Initiate bus reset
fwohci0: fwohci_intr_core: BUS reset
fwohci0: fwohci_intr_core: node_id=0x00000000, SelfID Count=2, CYCLEMASTER mode
firewire0: 1 nodes, maxhop <= 0 cable IRM irm(0)  (me)
firewire0: bus manager 0

>You might be able to boot the FreeBSD boot loader [...]
>If this doesn't work, I think you'd need most or all of /boot on the
>bootable device.

Thanks. This is probably the easiest way to go: boot off an USB stick with a minimal FreeBSD on it and mount the FW drive afterwards, hoping it doesn't slow down the system too much.

>If your main goal is to get the disks outside the case, you might consider eSATA [...]

You are definitely right, but I have a spare FW case I cannot use anymore on my Mac and I don't need very high I/O speeds. So if I can do it without buying new hardware it would be nice... :) Besides, it's a nice little challenge!

Cheers
Kevin