PowerMac G4 booting from memstick image

[Mehul Sanghvi]

I was able to boot manually using 

    boot hd:2,\:tbxi 

At that point I changed the /boot/loader.conf removing the kern.smp.disabled statement and than
rebooting.  I was expecting it to drop to the OF prompt but it auto-booted just fine.

But now I have the same issues as when I was installing earlier.  So seems like I have to keep the SMP kernel disabled.

dmesg shows that it saw two CPUs, but when using top, only one is seen (with SMP kernel disabled)

I am going to reboot with SMP disabled, until it is safe to enable it.


Next steps will be getting packages installed from ports. 





cheers,

   mehul



> On Apr 20, 2021, at 01:12 , Mehul Sanghvi <mehul.sanghvi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I was able to get FBSD-13 installed !
> 
> I did two things so am not sure which one actually worked
> 
> 1.  I changed to using an older USB stick I had
> 
> 2.  I did the following at loader prompt
> 
>    OK  unload
>    OK  set kern.smp.disabled=“1”
>    OK  boot-conf
> 
> 
> Hopefully I did that correctly and that was the fix rather than changing the USB stick
> 
> 
> The problem I have now is that OpenFirmware is setup to boot NetBSD and I don’t know what I need
> to set for the boot-device and boot-file variables in order for auto-boot to work.  At the moment I am unable to boot manually either.
> 
> cheers,
> 
>   mehul
> 
> 
>> On Apr 19, 2021, at 22:44 , Brandon Bergren <bdragon at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Apr 19, 2021, at 9:16 PM, Mehul Sanghvi wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Apr 19, 2021, at 21:42 , Brandon Bergren <bdragon at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> This may be caused by a descynced timebase. At the loader prompt, do "boot kern.smp.disabled=1" (or set it in the loader environment) and see if that fixes it.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> This would be after installing freebsd yes ? 
>> 
>> I meant while booting into the installer. You can hit a button during the countdown and boot with extra options.
>> 
>> Oh, and after some discussion in IRC, I realized that I was misremembering what I still needed on the G4 side, and it should theoretically work on *all* SMP G4s as-is.
>> 
>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Having gotten to the point of selecting Install,  the keyboard wouldn’t 
>>>>> work.  An Apple keyboard, hooked up via KVM switch, which was working 
>>>>> just fine upto that moment.  
>>>> 
>>>> I've seen this for some reason on ADB. I can usually work around it by using a USB keyboard. But it could be due to screwed up timers (due to timebase desync)
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> The Apple keyboard is an USB keyboard but I worked around it by using a 
>>> spare USB keyboard I had.
>> 
>> OK.
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> The ISO got past the mountroot issue, but too many messages of the form
>>> 
>>>   CAM status: CCB request completed with an error
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I may have to see if I have other USB flash dries around and try those. 
>>> It could very well be the USB flash.  I didn’t realize the G4s would 
>>> be picky about the stick that is used.
>> 
>> Well, generally the problem tends to be that the stick just plain doesn't show up as a disk at 1 device in OF.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> cheers,
>>> 
>>>   mehul
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Brandon Bergren
>> bdragon at FreeBSD.org
>