FreeBSD 10-STABLE powerpc64 r266807 CD PowerMac7, 2 (and 7, 11) boot hangs very early in the process

[Mark Millard]

[Unfortunately I've not yet figured out how to get much evidence for what is happening below and I'll soon not be near the equipment for some time. Still I figured a hint of a problem was better than no report. Mac OS X 10.5 media and lubuntu 14.04 media work fine in the PowerMac's in question. In fact the PowerMac7,11 has a dvd burn of FreeBSD-9.2-STABLE-powerpc-powerpc64-20140426-r264969-dvd1.iso installed. Also FreeBSD-9.3-PRERELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-20140510-r265858-disc1.iso burned to CD works fine for booting both the PowerMacs indicated below. The hardware seems to be fine.]

I downloaded FreeBSD-10.0-STABLE-powerpc-powerpc64-20140528-r266807-disc1.iso (md5 validated) and burned it to a CD and tried to use it in the available PowerMac7,2 that has openfirmware for PowerMac7,2 5.1.4f0 BootROM built on 11.21.03 at 17:41:48. So far no go. The details of attempts of boot from the CD tend to vary some. Open firmware has reported a couple of times:

Method <read-rectangle> not found; ihandle=ff23a40 phandle=ff6c1d8

and each time that it did so it then left me with two commands as options:

mac-boot
shut-down

But I do not consistently get this when using the option-key then select CD sequence, which is how I got it in the first place and also is the only way that I've got that message.

Usually with the Option-key, select CD, click on right arrow sequence the screen goes white briefly then it goes back to the display for selecting, re-finding the devices. The same thing happens again if I again make the selection and clock the right arrow.

For a C-key style boot it hangs shortly after displaying

loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf

and stops while displaying "/" from its progress indicator. The fans then gradually spin up.

Trying the available PowerMac7,11 gets the same sort of results so I'll not repeat the information.


(The FreeBSD-9.2-STABLE-powerpc-powerpc64-20140426-r264969-dvd1.iso had /PACKAGES/FREEBSD_9_X86_64/... for some reason. No PPC/PPC64 packages. Being new to FreeBSD I was mislead by seeing the -dvd1.iso before figuring out to not expect to find PowerPC packages. But I used the download rather than downloading more. I will ignore future PowerPC ...-dvd1.iso's for now.)

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Mark Millard
markmi at dsl-only.net