after running the installer on a PowerMac G5 no root filesystem found

[Justin Hibbits]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2018 11:52:45 -0500
Dennis Clarke <dclarke at blastwave.org> wrote:

> <snip>
> >>>
> >>> At first boot I get a load of text and then a strange prompt that
> >>> seems to be asking where is the root filesystem? It also lists
> >>> all the various filesystems found. I tried to enter
> >>> ufs:/dev/adas2 and similar things but this gets me nothing but an
> >>> unrecognized filesystem message.
> >>>
> >>> So .. something obvious?  
> >> Can you try setting the variable kern.smp.disabled to 1 at the
> >> loader prompt?
> >> If that helps, you can add
> >> kern.smp.disabled=1
> >> to /boot/leader.conf  
> > I meant /boot/loader.conf.  
> 
> To do that at all I would need to be able to get to the root
> filesystem.

You can do it at the loader.

set kern.smp.disabled=1
boot

> 
> >> I had all sorts of problems until I disabled SMP on my G5
> >> PowerMacs. Without SMP they are running very stable.  
> 
> So FreeBSD can not run on ye old IBM PPC970 units with multiple cores
> or multiple sockets?  That sounds like a critical bug.

It could until recently, due to my fault.  I can revert the change that
caused it, but haven't yet, because I don't understand why it's causing
the problem.  And I'm pretty confident it's not causing the mountroot
issue (though, I was pretty confident it wouldn't cause any problem
anyway, but that turned out to be false confidence).

> 
> Dennis Clarke

Can you somehow get a dmesg dump to post to the list?  I'm very curious
to see what could be causing the problem you're seeing.

- Justin