Re: Boot Loader: OFW network booting support

On Sun, Nov 20, 2022 at 9:47 PM Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 10:04:12AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> > ...
> > So here's the deal. If someone has the ability to test and shows that
> it's
> > working today and promises to test my changes and help me debug it, then
> > I'll keep it and add the new code that's needed to continue to support
> this
> > feature.
>
> I'd happily test anything on my venerable Mac mini G4 (which I currently
> use to ensure ports' endian-cleanness and 32-bit compliance).
>

OK. There's a patch-train available at https://reviews.freebsd.org/D37560,
but I don't know if you'll be able to easily apply it (there's 22 reviews).

Alternatively, you can try the boot-devs branch at
https://github.com/bsdimp/freebsd.git which is the same thing.


> > Alternatively, if someone has the recipe for FreeBSD/powerpc on QEMU that
> > includes OpenFirmware for disks and networking, I'll do the testing and
> > legwork to get my netboot setup locally.
>
> I'll play with that as well.  I recall last time I needed it, finding that
> our Wiki doesn't have much working examples of different systems' emuation
> was frustrating, so at the very least I could probably expand it.
>

Yea. I've managed to get mac99 emulation on qemu-system-powerpc working
well enough to do the test boot, at least for disks. Still haven't found
the secret decoder ring for netbooting with openfirmware, though. There's a
network stack in the current Open BIOS used by qemu, though, so there may
be hope.

Warner