Re: head -r365932 on PowerMac G5 (2 dual-core sockets): Crashes before login prompt if powerd is enabled in /etc/rc.conf

[Brandon Bergren]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020, at 5:10 PM, Mark Millard wrote:
> In my enviroment, doing:
> 
> gpart bootcode -p /boot/boot1.hfs -i1 ada1
> 
> from a modern, booting context got the failing
> SSD to boot single-socket, single-core PowerMacs.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> It changed the behavior of 2-socket G4 as well but
> that context now reports starting only one of the 2
> CPUs and things do not go well from there. For
> example, USB2 fails and it basically hangs up before
> the login prompt (but it does check the root file
> system). It even reported something about NUMA
> domain 0 in the messages that I saw go by.

Yes, for me on my 2-socket G4, it gets as far as mounting the root filesystem and starting filesystem checks before it hangs. I still need to set up dcons there and poke around a bit.

> 
> Before, 2-socket died much earlier. But it is not
> getting to a status where I have any control/access.
> 
> Of course, so far as I know, nothing has fixed the
> "kernel sometimes zeros user space pages that it
> should not" problem (even when sitting idle). So,
> ultimately, 32-bit powerpc FreeBSD is not sufficiently
> useful on any of the machines, other than via chroot
> on a powerpc64 FreeBSD machine.

I do know there is a bug somewhere in bridge mode that corrupts things when running 32 bit on a G5 processor, but G3 and G4 should still be working fine...

Is this with an up-to-date userland? I do know there were some atomic issues in userland at one point, but they should all be sorted out now.

> 
> Anyway, I've a bunch of SSDs to update so the basic
> problem does not reappear if I grab another one.
> 
> ===
> Mark Millard
> marklmi at yahoo.com
> ( dsl-only.net went
> away in early 2018-Mar)
> 
>

-- 
  Brandon Bergren
  bdragon at FreeBSD.org