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

[Dennis Clarke]

On 11/14/18 12:02 PM, Justin Hibbits wrote:
> 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
> 

Right then ... let's give that a whirl!

>>
>>>> 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).
> 

Let's not do anything hasty.  I like to get piles of data and maybe I
  can lend a hand here.

> 
> 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.

Oh I wish there were a serial port on these old things somewhere ... I 
will start with just getting to a first boot single user mode or otherwise.

Dennis