Installing FreeBSD from CD

[Michael Dexter]

Peter and co.,

>>My listing ends with the ad0: entry but no acd0: entry. Is the 
>>device bay drive not supported?

  Yep, that's right. There's no equivalent yet to NetBSD's macppc/dev/mediabay.c


Okay, so media bay will have to wait.

Failing that, I concluded that it would be easiest to mount the 
PowerBook (Pismo) in FireWire "target disk mode" on an x86 system 
from which I can partition and install software either from install 
ISO binaries or source.

Assumption: UFS2 under x86 will be the same as UFS2 under PowerPC. Flawed?

Upon insertion, the console reports expected initialization plus:

sbp0:0:0 Request type not supported

... many times but seems to initialize. I can run sysinstall and 
partition the drive. The error appears to come from the FireWire 
kernel module:

http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/firewire/sbp.h?v=RELENG54

I've been using a "normal" external FireWire drive on 5.x for some 
time without problems, finding it more reliable (and faster) than USB 
drives.

Then things get weird. I find that I often can only mount the 
PowerBook to the x86 host ONCE before the x86 host stops recognizing 
it. Sometimes a reboot of the x86 host allows the "external drive" to 
be initialized again but often only a complete host OS re-install 
will remedy the problem. At first I thought the external drive was 
getting corrupted and re-formatted it under Mac OS X.

I ran 'ls -lart' on obvious parts of the host filesystem and did not 
see anything that would suggest it was changed by the operation. FS 
snapshots might help but the man pages seem to have gone away.

Any ideas of what in the host OS I could re-load/re-initialize to get 
a "fresh" view of FireWire devices? Reboot usually doesn't help.

Any similar experiences? Am I chasing FireWire driver bugs?


If I could get this arrangement to work, my hope was to format the 
PowerBook as 1/2 HFS+ (for boot loader) with Disk Utility under Mac 
OS X and 1/2 UFS2 using sysinstall on the host x86 machine. I thought 
I had found the cause of the device recognition problem when I found 
the Mac/PC "Partition Scheme" options in Disk Utility but alternating 
between them proved not to make a difference, except that "PC 
Partition Scheme" will not allow HFS and hence the FreeBSD loader. No 
problem, maybe I could boot to CD for the loader or the external 
FireWire drive, given that Open Firmware appears to be FireWire-aware.


Again assuming that UFS2 partitions created under x86 will work, I 
was hoping to use my binary jail trick to install FreeBSD using 
Peter's December miniinst.iso:

cat /cdrom/base/base.?? | tar -Uxpf - -C /mnt (Where PowerBook is mounted)

Else from source but I encountered the following build errors:

Under 5.4 (not expected to work)

===> lib/libpthread
"Makefile", line 41: Could not find 
/usr/src/lib/libpthread/arch/powerpc/Makefile.inc


And under current:

building shared library libasn1.so.7
Abort trap (core dumped)
*** Error code 134

Stop in /usr/src/kerberos5/lib/libasn1.
*** Error code 1


Any ideas if the FireWire external drive approach "should" work?

Was miniinst.iso created with a normal 'make release' process?

Thanks,

Michael.


>>During initial CD boot, it read:
>>
>>Booted from: /pci at f2000000/mac-io at 17/media-bay at 34/ata-3 at 20000/disk at 0
>>/
>>/boot/kernel/kernel...
>>
>>Does that help any?
>
>  Yep - it shows that the CD is underneath the mediabay node. The 
>current ATA code only handles ATA devices directly attached to the 
>mac-io node.
>
>  I had a quick glance at the NetBSD code. It doesn't look difficult, 
>so I'll put it on the TODO list. Might take a while though.
>
>later,
>
>Peter.