FreeBSD 12.0-ALPHA4 fails to boot on POWER9/KVM

[Mark Millard]

On 2018-Oct-11, at 11:19 AM, Dennis Clarke <dclarke at blastwave.org> wrote:

> On 10/10/2018 11:59 PM, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> The first part of this (all the errors about "NOT FOUND") I just fixed
>> and the fixes will be included in BETA1 and subsequent builds. The
>> remaining issue is that virtio SCSI is not part of the standard kernel
>> on PPC (there are some endian and DMA bugs), so you will need to use an
>> alternative storage backend. The default storage backend (VSCSI) is
>> fine, as are more PC-ish things like AHCI emulation.
>> This command line will work and is otherwise equivalent to the below:
>> qemu-system-ppc64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -nographic -vga none -cdrom
>> FreeBSD-12.0-ALPHA9-powerpc-powerpc64-20181009-r339271-disc1.iso
>> /var/lib/libvirt/images/freebsd-ppc.qcow2 -mem-prealloc -mem-path
>> /dev/hugepages -smp 2
>> -Nathan
> 
> 
> Has anyone tried this on a PowerMac G5 yet ?

"this"? I'm unsure if the following is addressing what you are
referring to or not. But it might be.

Until the problems with -r334498 's adjustment to VM_MAX_KERNEL_ADDRESS
are dealt with, PowerMac G5's have boot problems (and possibly other
problems), at least those with multiple sockets (for what I can test).
(I've no access to other forms of PowerMac G5's.)

See:

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ppc/2018-October/009669.html

and later in that thread. (Earlier in the thread is likely a waste of time
to read, given what is now known.)

My G5 contexts are operational by reverting -r334498 . The contexts are
otherwise based on -r339076 currently.


Note:

My boot test on a 8 GiByte, dual-socket, one "CPU" per socket,
PowerMac G5 met the conditions of Andreas Tobler's requested test
conditions and the machine boot fine (VM_MAX_KERNEL_ADDRESS near
the RAM size, on the low side).

The G5 so-called "Quad Core"s, 4 cores total in each system but
split evenly across 2 sockets in each), one with 12 GiByte and
one with 16 GiByte of RAM, booted fine as well. But
VM_MAX_KERNEL_ADDRESS was somewhat under 8GiByte and so not near
those sizes.


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)