Trying to cross-build FreeBSD 10 release ISOs for sparc64

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

On 06/09/15 10:56, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 12:40:57PM +0100, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
>> 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:
>>
>> [...]
>> 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'm trying to test the patch in https://reviews.freebsd.org/D2791, and
> today had encountered exactly this problem with "scheme 'VTOC8': Invalid
> argument" of gpart(8).
> 
> Quick googling had revealed [1] that it might happen due to endianess
> being different on i386 (host) and sparc64 (target).  I'll need to have
> a closer look at gpart(8) sources to know better about it, but trying
> to make sparc64 iso-image on big-endian PowerPC allowed to create VTOC8
> scheme and produce bootable images.

I had exactly the same problem, and eventually John pointed me in the
right direction:

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-sparc64/2015-June/009606.html

If I kldload the geom_part_vtoc8 module then I can build from a
cross-compile environment setup on x86 and all is well.


HTH,

Mark.