PowerMac G4 booting from memstick image

[Nathan Whitehorn]

FreeBSD boots like MacOS and will be auto-detected by firmware. The lazy 
solution is to reset OF by holding command-option-P-R at bootup and then 
let auto-boot go. You can also use the graphical chooser to boot FreeBSD 
(hold option at boot).

If you want to do it the hard way, you can boot from "hd:,\\:tbxi".
-Nathan

On 4/20/21 1:12 AM, Mehul Sanghvi 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
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