Trying to cross-build FreeBSD 10 release ISOs for sparc64

Mark Cave-Ayland mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk
Sat Aug 23 11:41:34 UTC 2014


Hi all,

Further to my earlier post, I figured it would probably make sense to 
setup my own FreeBSD build environment to work out what was happening 
but I can't seem to produce any valid ISOs for qemu-system-sparc64. The 
steps I took were as follows:

1) Created a new VM on a KVM amd64 host
2) Downloaded the latest FreeBSD 10 amd64 release ISO
3) Installed the basic system
4) Followed the instructions in the developers handbook to cross-build a 
kernel (TARGET=sparc64 TARGET_ARCH=sparc64)
5) Try and boot generated ISOs

While the output ISOs are generated, they appear to be invalid (or at 
least OpenBIOS can't find a valid partition on them). Reviewing the 
logs, the entire build process seems to work all the way up to the point 
where the ISOs are generated which looks like this:


root at freebsd:/usr/src/release # make -dx TARGET=sparc64 
TARGET_ARCH=sparc64 cdrom
sh /usr/src/release/sparc64/mkisoimages.sh -b FreeBSD_Install disc1.iso 
release
Calculated size of `/tmp/bootfs.PjPBSKfi/bootfs.img': 524288 bytes, 4 inodes
Extent size set to 8192
/tmp/bootfs.PjPBSKfi/bootfs.img: 0.5MB (1024 sectors) block size 8192, 
fragment size 1024
         using 1 cylinder groups of 0.50MB, 64 blks, 64 inodes.
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
  32,
Populating `/tmp/bootfs.PjPBSKfi/bootfs.img'
Image `/tmp/bootfs.PjPBSKfi/bootfs.img' complete
16+0 records in
16+0 records out
8192 bytes transferred in 0.000175 secs (46811633 bytes/sec)
1510+1 records in
1511+0 records out
495124480 bytes transferred in 35.611080 secs (13903664 bytes/sec)
1+1 records in
2+0 records out
655360 bytes transferred in 0.002090 secs (313572789 bytes/sec)
2+0 records in
2+0 records out
655360 bytes transferred in 0.001184 secs (553519748 bytes/sec)
gpart: scheme 'VTOC8': Invalid argument
gpart: No such geom: md0.
gpart: No such geom: md0.


Superficially it looks as if gpart can't understand the partitioning 
scheme used for sparc64 ISOs but does anyone else have any ideas as to 
why this isn't working? I should add that the FreeBSD 10 release sparc64 
ISOs downloaded directly from freebsd.org appear to be fine and start to 
boot as intended.


Many thanks,

Mark.


More information about the freebsd-sparc64 mailing list