PowerMac G4 booting from memstick image

[Mark Millard]

On 2021-Apr-19, at 16:34, Mehul Sanghvi <mehul.sanghvi at gmail.com> wrote:

> . . .
> 
> I’ll go ahead and create an image with 13.0 and see if that works.

13.0-RELEASE was a major change, in that 32-bit PowrePC is finally using
modern llvm/clang-based toochain instead of a gcc 4.2.1 based toolchain.
Effectively, pre-13.0 is not as well unsupported at this point, if I
understand right.

In other words, it is unlikely that you would want to use a 12.x
version at all unless you have reasons to be using the old toolchain.

>   As I understand it 13.0 handles SMP on the G4 better, and since I have a G$ with 2 CPUs, that would be better anyway.

13.0-RELEASE does not contain code changes to deal with FreeBSD's
PowerPC problems in that area as far as I know. There is work
going on in/for main in the area but some of it has not been
checked into main yet, if I understand right. The range of 32-bit
PowerMacs covered and if your hardware is (would be) I do not know.

There are other issues as well. For example:

Unfortunately, the FreeBSD 32-bit kernel that covers PowerMacs (G3/G4)
slowly zeros out pages of user processes that it should not touch.
This ends up causing some processes to crash and probably other, less
obvious, issues. It is not a reliable environment. To my knowledge,
this area is not under active development currently but the basic
issue of what type of thing is missing was identified some time back.
(The 64-bit kernel that covers G5s does not have this problem.)

There is more, but the above two are fairly major items out of the
overall list.

These issues are not unique to 13.0+ as far as I know. Using 12.x
likely would not avoid them.



>> On Apr 19, 2021, at 19:10 , Alfredo Dal'Ava Júnior <alfredo at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Mehul,
>> 
>> It's in the FreeBSD loader but it looks like something is wrong with the kernel, it should be loading it at this point. 
>> 
>> Did you try release 13.0? Please write the USB stick with disc1.iso instead, that's how I booted/installed on by G4 last time. 
>> 
>> []'s
>> Alfredo
>> 
>> Em seg., 19 de abr. de 2021 19:56, Mehul Sanghvi <mehul.sanghvi at gmail.com> escreveu:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>>   I am trying to boot FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE from a USB stick which had the memstick image on it.
>> 
>>   I can get to the OF boot prompt, but how do I boot from there ?  
>> 
>>   The USB stick is located at the devalias usb0 as far as I can tell.
>> 
>>   What would the boot command be ?  Looking at https://i.redd.it/0ypv6vmi63231.jpg it seems I need some arguments, but I don’t know where or how to find them.
>> 
>>    The Handbook has instructions on how to create a memstick.img but nothing that I could find regarding how to boot from it.
>> 
>> 


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